How (and why) I write from the messy middle
You owe it to your voice to wade into the mess
When your life has been completely rearranged and you’re still picking up the pieces, it can feel tempting to *pens down* and tell yourself that writing, marketing, connection, that creative project, the book… whatever The Thing might be, is something you don’t have capacity for right now (and sometimes, that’s totally valid, your process is yours alone).
But, when your body has betrayed you twice in six months and your hormones are doing things that make you feel like a stranger in your own skin and you wake up exhausted even after sleeping for ten hours because grief lives in your teeth now and recovery isn’t linear and nobody prepared you for how fucking hard it would be to just... exist… maybe writing yourself back to life and sharing the process not just the product isn’t such a bad idea?
I’m not sure I can answer that question as a definite yes, but this is where I am. in the eye of the storm, trying to make sense of what it means to create when everything feels uncertain.
Four months ago, I knew who I was. I had routines. I had energy. I had a body that mostly cooperated with my plans. I felt on top of my creative game. Then life decided to teach me about impermanence and the flailing nature of creativity in the most brutal way possible: two back-to-back miscarriages that sent my entire system into chaos. Suddenly I was dealing with hormone crashes that made me feel like I was losing my mind, a diagnosis that came with a shopping list of issues that would take months to repair and an exhaustion so deep it felt ancestral.
Right after I posted a note on Substack that read:
The universe went, lol you wanna bet?
For the first time in my life, I couldn't think my way out of something. I couldn't optimise or strategise or motivate myself back to baseline. I was just... surviving. and trying to figure out how to keep writing when my usual relationship with creativity had completely dissolved.
I’ve been here before, of course. But every time this void feeling hits a little different. I’ve learned, over the years, that the only way out is through. But this time going through has felt like peddling a bicycle uphill through waist-deep, wet concrete.
here’s what I’ve been learning about creating from the void and what I’m doing this time around:
1. I’m writing to discover what I think, not to share what I know.
when your world gets turned upside down, your opinions about everything shift. what I thought about resilience, about my body, about control, about timelines, about creativity, about writing from the messy middle, even — all of it got scrambled. so instead of trying to make sense of it privately and then sharing the polished insights, I write to figure out what I actually believe now. This article is the result of some of that musing. I’ll start with something like “I think I’m angry but I'm not sure what at” and write until something true tingles my belly. The writing becomes the thinking, not just the reporting. Try this simple prompt: The one thing quietly insisting on my attention right now is…
2. I’m documenting the contradictions instead of pretending they don’t exist.
Yesterday I felt grateful for the lessons these experiences have taught me. Today I want to scream at anyone who suggests there’s a silver lining to losing two pregnancies and the subsequent fallout your body needlessly barrels through. Both feelings get to exist in my work. The more I study my contradictions, tension, nuance, the better my writing has got. The messy middle is a beautiful place to figure out the things that make no fucking sense, and let them exist anyway. I’ve stopped trying to be resolute and started letting my complexity show. Turns out, people connect more with your contradictions than your conclusions.
3. I’m writing about the texture of recovery and the specifics of this experience, not just the milestones.
Your subconscious will annoyingly want to know when you’ll be “back to normal”. But recovery isn’t a straight line from broken to fixed. It’s the weird middle space where you’re functioning but everything feels effortful. You can write a brilliant piece in the morning but then spend the afternoon crying because you can’t open a tin of diced tomatoes. I’m writing about these unglamorous up and down and in-between moments because that’s where real humaning happens and if I want to write from the middle, I have to let it exist outside my mind — this doesn’t mean you have to share any of it right now, but documenting it is a good way to untangle what feels like it wants to be shared (this one is also deeply healing, imho, worth it regardless).
4. I’m sharing what I’m learning, as I’m learning it, not after I’ve mastered it.
The most honest writing happens when you’re still in the thick of figuring it out. When will we not be? I hope I never stop being in the thick of it, of something, maybe not this, but other things. There is so much of your voice to explore when you’re documenting the experiment of trying new supplements, changing your diet, taking medication, processing trauma, learning to rest without guilt, whatever the middle might look like right now. I’ll write about a realisation I had yesterday even if I might disagree with it next week. the real-time nature of it makes it (and me) feel alive.
5. I’m writing like my future self might disagree with me.
And that’s okay. Grief has a weird way of clouding your thoughts. But I don’t want to feel like “I can’t say anything from here, just incase I don’t feel it when I get there”. These words are true for who I am right now, in this season. Future me might have different answers. Past me definitely had different questions. I’m not trying to write timeless wisdom — I’m trying to capture what it feels like to be human in this particular moment of slowly putting myself back together again.
6. I’ve stopped waiting for the “lesson” to reveal itself.
I used to think every difficult experience had to teach me something profound that I could package up and share. but sometimes shit things just happen and the only lesson is that life is unpredictable and bodies are fragile and recovery takes longer than anyone tells you. Sometimes the story is just “this happened and it was really hard and I'm still processing it”. And, as my nana would say, darling, that’s enough.
7. I’m writing from my body, not just my head.
When disconnection lives in your subconscious, intellectual processing only goes so far. I’ve learned (thanks to my Creative Living co-creator and somatic goddess
) to write from the places that ache. Describing the way grief sits in my chest like a bird with broken wings. Noticing how my shoulders hold the memory of all the times I’ve had to be strong when I wanted to collapse. The body (and subconscious) keeps different records than the mind and it has different stories to tell. I write, I disconnect, I move, I breathe, I notice, I let my subconscious make sense of the rest.8. I practice writing about things that don’t have names yet.
The grief that comes with losing something you never got to hold is acute, you only know it if you’ve experienced it. It’s visceral. Even if you never planned it. Even if you didn’t get long to make sense of it. You can’t control it. It’s so hard to explain unless you’ve felt it. And, for someone who kinda does the word thing for a living, finding things hard to explain is an interesting conundrum. There’s a quality of exhaustion that isn’t solved by sleep. there’s the strange relief that comes with finally having a diagnosis after months of feeling like you must be melting. I try to catch these unnamed experiences and give them words, because language is how I make sense of the senseless.
9. I’ve learned to operate on my own timeline, not the internet’s.
I stopped trying to post every day a loooong time ago and started committing to writing every day instead. sitting with myself. having conversations with my thoughts. some days, good stuff comes through — something that feels alive and worth sharing. that puts me back in conversation with my community and my work, and then it happens more frequently. but some days, nothing wants to come. and I’ve realised that stopping is just sometimes absolutely necessary. The pauses give you more ideas, more creative energy, more readiness than forcing through ever could.
AND I hate myself for stopping. and that’s okay too. I hate that I had all of this momentum and boundless creative energy back in May and it’s felt like white-knuckling life ever since. But if I’d pushed through or forced it, it would have only taken longer to crack the shell. The internet wants consistency, but creativity wants seasons.
10. I trust that incomplete thoughts can still be complete gifts.
You don’t have to have it all figured out to offer something valuable. Sometimes the most generous thing you can do is share your confusion beautifully. Let someone know they’re not the only one sitting with big questions and small answers. let them know that being in the middle of the mess is a valid place to live and write and create and share from. Build real, actual community. The kind that’s full of people you’d genuinely invite for dinner and the kinds of conversations you’d be having at that dinner table with candles flickering and no back-space button.
11.I’m remembering that the person I become through creating is infinitely more valuable than whatever I actually create, and sometimes the outcome is none of my business.
Every carefully-selected word, stream-of-consciousness Notes App clusterfuck, every brush-stroke, every draft, every chord or clay-smeared fingerprint, every single thing you create tilts the chemistry of your own body. While you’re busy obsessing over whether anyone will get it, your nervous system is quietly rewiring itself for nuance, risk-taking and breath-deep presence.
That poem you wrote at 2 a.m.? It didn’t move the algorithm, but it moved you two millimetres closer to the person you keep promising you’ll become “when things calm down”.
The masterpiece is never the thing that hangs on a wall or goes viral.
The masterpiece is the human being who walks out of the room after making it, committing to it, showing up for it, sitting with it. Even in the messy middle.
So let the outcome worry about itself. Your job is to stand in the creative slipstream and let it rearrange your soul first.
12. I’m starting with one true sentence.
One of my favourite exercises I get my clients to do when they feel blocked or stuck in the void or the mess and the chaos just won’t release them from its grip, is something i stole from Hemingway:
“I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know’. So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say”
Write one true sentence.
Just write the truest sentence for you right at this moment and follow it from there.
It. never. fails.
That’s pretty much it.
The messy middle isn’t a pit stop on the way to “the end”. It’s where most of life actually happens. It’s where we spend most of our time when we’re honest about what it really looks like to be human. it’s where the real work of reconstruction takes place, slowly, imperfectly, without guarantee of a happy ending.
so I’m writing from here. I’m sharing this now. Posting it at the “wrong time” and probably with typos. But this is where we’ll start to come back to doing good work, from right here. In this nebulous, but very real and human and alive place, the place where my body is still learning to trust itself again. Where I’m still figuring out what it means to be me in yet another new configuration (of which I hope there are endless). The story is still writing itself and I don't know how it ends, and that’s actually pretty cool.
Because maybe the point isn’t to have answers. maybe the point is to document the becoming and offer company in the uncertainty. Maybe, actually, the point is just to prove that you can create something beautiful even when you’re being human.
maybe especially then.
Your writing practice
Your only practice for today is just to write one true sentence.
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know”
That’s it. Just one sentence. Not a paragraph, not a post, not a perfectly curated opinion piece about the state of the world. One sentence that feels true to where you are right now.
Don't overthink it. Don’t edit it. Just write the truest sentence you can access in this moment. And, I want to gently challenge you to go share it as a Substack note. Right now. Just that one sentence. No explanation, no context, no apology for its incompleteness.
Hi, I'm Lois. I write from my little treehouse in the Costa Rican jungle, where I live with two little humans I made and also where I spend most of my time helping writers, entrepreneurs and creatives say The Damn Thing. This is The Smoking Area, my lil corner of the internet where we break all the rules and we pour our hearts out to each other like it’s 3am and we’re sharing a cig outside a bang average party.
If this spoke to you, and you’re craving deeper support with writing from your truth, I have something special opening soon:
Creative Living is my 8-week writing-based community I co-created exactly one year ago with
and it’s one of my proudest creations to date. This year it’s getting bigger and more beautiful than ever. It’s a community and practice space for anyone who wants to stop performing their life and start creating, writing it and building it.Other courses teach you how to write. Creative Living reminds you why you must.
We’re launching a completely new experience this October — think of it as your creative & writing operating system, with daily prompts, weekly circles, workshops, somatic practices, and a community of people who understand that your unfinished thoughts matter more than your polished prose.
The waitlist is open now, and if you join, you’ll be first to hear about early bird pricing and get access to some beautiful bonuses we’re putting together.
You don’t just need another productivity hack or a schedule or a perfectly finished story. You need a practice. A rhythm. A relationship with your own voice that can weather anything. And a community that will see you in it and celebrate it all.
From someone who is currently navigating their first miscarriage: from the bottom of my heart, thank you ❤️
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. It was raw, honest, and moved something in me. Thanks for writing