I didn’t know what to write about when I took a creative nonfiction course in the first year of undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto back in September 2010.
The prompt was to “write about an experience that happened during your childhood,” and I hoped to avoid having to bring up my mental health, but no matter how I tried to write about other things, the pull toward writing about my experiences of mental ill-health drew me back in.
Somehow, after the first few classes, the identity I had come into university with, as a struggling freshman with no idea what she wanted to do with her life, shifted into that of an aspiring writer who had something to say and experiences to share and truly wished to tell her story with humility—and hone her writing skills.
I wrote about my mental health experiences as short stories in every single one of my writing classes over the next five years. I ended up putting together a collection of those short stories as a book in my final year at the university. Called “Becoming Silver Girl,” the book won two literary awards from the Mississauga Arts Council and was a creative nonfiction finalist at the Independent Book Awards, the only kind in Canada that awards self-published books.
There are a few things I learned from writing and publishing Becoming Silver Girl.
First, everyone has a story to tell. It doesn’t matter who you are, you have something interesting and unique to share. I never thought I could turn my everyday reality into stories that people would read and enjoy and learn something from. But doing so taught me the value of finding interesting, unique angles in everyday experiences, how to spot details that would make a story come alive, and how to tell a seemingly mundane experience in a compelling way.
Second, how you see yourself matters more than anything else. Shift your identity and you shift everything else.
I went from getting out of high school, after experiencing some mental health struggles during my adolescence, to having a single-minded purpose as an adult, through writing about those adolescent health struggles. I became someone with a definitive goal: become an actual writer. That motivated me through many tough times. And all it took was seeing myself in a different light.
Perhaps start by asking yourself if you have, somewhere within you, a lesson that you can bring out from the pain you experience. That can start you down a road of realizing you have a lot of experience to share that you could potentially transform into wisdom, use to help someone else on a similar journey, and result in you becoming a stronger person with a totally different identity. Somewhere in the experience of transforming pain into purpose through my writing, for example, I met a ton of people who resonated with the story and had similar experiences.
Shifting my identity to give myself courage to tell my mental health stories gave others the permission they needed to also see themselves differently and talk to me about their own mental health struggles. It led to a lot of heartfelt conversations and resulted in instantaneous friendships.
Basically, I stopped asking myself, “What should I do with my life?” and started asking, “What makes me different? What can I uniquely offer people??” and the identity then shifted from “meandering, wandering, lost teenager” to “focussed, passionate aspiring writer” driven by a desire to overcome barriers like mental ill-health, and show others how they can, too.
Third, consistency is so much more important than talent. If you have the courage to show up every day and do the hard stuff, and do what matters to you… whether that’s writing a novel on your laptop or painting on oil canvasses or coaching someone through their public speaking skills or building a startup, the people who succeed are the ones who put the most reps in, the most number of days into their art or their business, and showed up consistently.
After attending an MFA in creative writing after my undergrad, I am even more convinced that it’s true that consistency trumps talent every time, because I don’t think the most successful people coming out of the MFA were the people with the most talent. The most successful were simply the ones who put in the effort and time to write and plug away at making the writing work—and who took constructive feedback seriously!
Finally, I learned that your lived experience is actually an unfair advantage. It’s what makes you different, and what makes you different is actually what makes you powerful.
I started off writing about mental health. I want to write now about healing through writing and transformation through storytelling. I want to share that you can transform your pain into purpose. I wrote my pain into a life story that helped others on their journeys. But writing is one way you can offer people something of value. There are so many ways to help yourself and, then in turn, help others.
In 2006, I was in a psychiatric ward. Now, it’s 2026, and my identity has shifted a thousand ways throughout the years, but I still remember all the lessons I learned from 20 years ago when I struggled as an adolescent to find meaning and purpose in my life. And I want to use these lessons to help others.
If you’re interested in writing, healing, entrepreneurship, and building a freedom-based creative life, follow me on LinkedIn.
