No One’s Hurting Me
...and I’m Still Writing?
I used to think I needed to hurt in order to write.
Not just “go through hard things.” I mean real pain. Deep, complicated pain. The kind that makes you sit on the floor of your bathroom and narrate your own breakdown in your head as it's happening because even in the middle of it, you're trying to figure out how it might sound on the page.
It wasn’t conscious. At first.
But somewhere along the line, I started associating all my best writing with the people who hurt me. And not in an abstract way—I mean literally. I wrote about them. I built whole essays around them. I made their cruelty poetic. I romanticized the worst moments of my life just because they gave me something to structure a paragraph around.
At some point, I stopped just surviving pain and started chasing it. Not dramatically. Just quietly, sneakily. I kept going back to people I knew were bad to and for me, saying yes to situations I knew would drain me. Not because I believed it would end differently, but because I didn’t know who I was without the heartbreak. Because it felt productive. Familiar. Safe, in its own kind of damaging way.
If I wasn’t hurting, what was I supposed to write about?
The worst part is I honestly believed that made me deep. I believed pain gave me insight. Complexity. Voice. I believed the suffering was part of the process, like an initiation. Like dues I had to keep paying if I wanted the words to keep coming.
And then—I stopped.
Not writing. Just… hurting.
Or rather, I stopped going toward the things that hurt me.
I stopped letting people back in just to see if the story would change. I stopped trying to squeeze meaning out of situations that had already shown me exactly what they were. I stopped mistaking chaos for inspiration.
And for the first time in a long time, I felt peace. Not a fake, curated, “self-care” kind of peace. Just actual calm.
I was sleeping. Eating. Laughing. Making things. Saying no. Feeling—fine.
And I hated it.
At first, it felt like I was doing something wrong. Like I’d missed a memo. Or skipped a step. I kept waiting for the ground to give out. I didn’t trust any of it, I felt like I’d left the stove on somewhere, emotionally. Like I was supposed to be panicking and had just forgotten why.
I'd walk around my apartment like it was a set piece and the plot hadn't kicked in yet. There was no villain, no scene partner, no monologue. Just me and the stillness—and I kept holding my breath, like something was about to happen. Like I’d accidentally stepped into someone else’s peaceful life and would be asked to leave at any moment.
I didn’t know how to function without a low-level ache underneath everything. I didn’t know how to write about a day that didn’t implode.
I kept thinking: if I’m not in pain, what the fuck do I have to say?
It took time and distance and way too many podcasts for me to see what was actually happening. That I wasn’t just healing. I was detoxing. From the belief that pain was necessary. From the idea that being a writer meant being miserable. That being used and discarded somehow made me more interesting.
I forgot that I started writing long before anything horrible ever happened to me.
Before heartbreak. Before trauma. Before I knew what it meant to be used.
I started writing when I was a kid, because it felt good. Because I liked it.
Because joy, not pain, was the first place my creativity ever came from.
And now that I’ve stopped offering myself up to people who only ever wanted to take, the writing hasn’t stopped. It’s gotten louder. Faster. Better.
I’m writing more now than I ever did when I was trying to mine my sadness for significance. And the work feels more interesting. More honest. More mine. Not because it’s happier—but because it isn’t shaped by a wound I haven’t healed from yet.
I think I was scared that if I got better, I’d get boring. That if I stopped being broken, I’d stop being good.
But the truth is: I’m still a writer. I’m just not bleeding for it anymore.
And the work is still true.
Only now, it’s not coming from a place of lack. It’s coming from a place of wanting to build something.
I know who I am when I’m in pain.
I’m finally learning who I am when I’m not.
… is that okay? Can I say it again?
I know who I am when I’m in pain.
I’m finally learning who I am when I’m not!!!
