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I have been reading the book Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and doing the timed writing practice she describes and recommends in it. The whole idea is to keep my hand moving, not stopping to reread or change anything for the full amount of time I have chosen to write.
According to Natalie Goldberg, “the aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.”*
Here is something I wrote recently –
Monday, Sept. 28th 2026
I don’t particularly feel like writing, at least a part of me doesn’t. I have an uneasy sense that I will be hurt or punished for expressing my truth. I found myself laying in bed this morning, not wanting to do anything except stare blankly at a sprinkler faucet protruding out of the ceiling over my bed. There was a feeling of safety in being still, doing nothing, thinking nothing. As close to non-existence as I could possibly be without killing myself. There was safety there.
Now, not so much. As I write, part of me thinks -“You’re in danger! Men in dark suits and sun glasses could come bursting through the door at any moment and grab you and shake you down, drag you away, and you’d never be heard of again”.
Part of me gets mad at these thoughts, because I know they were implanted in me when I was a small child by the violent, ugly, men in the lab-like places I was brought to. The men in white lab coats and military uniform who strapped me by my wrists and ankles to a sturdy wooden chair and put a metal helmet made of bands of steel and wires on my head. These men also poked and prodded me with sticks and straps, their fingers and ugly faces, hypodermic needles, and wires in the backs of my hands.
They terrorized me when I was very small -4, 5, 6, years old. Hurting me in my vagina, my head, hands, wrists, and ankles. Hurting me with energy – electricity, probing fingers, angry, demeaning words – calling me worthless and stupid unless I obeyed. These men wanted me silent and frightened my entire life. They wanted my life to end by my own actions, at a young age, – by my twenties or thirties or even sooner.
Creativity, they knew, allows for the truth to come out, so they did their best to extinguish or block my creative expression through terror and violence, having me witness other children being beaten and/or killed for supposedly “telling someone” or disobeying “the rules”.
Part of me realizes my fear of expression was instilled within me as a child by these sick, sadistic men so that their crimes against children and adults would never be found out. They wanted their sexual abuse and torture of children I witnessed to be brought to my grave, and the part of me that knows this had me sit and take a pen in my hand and begin to write my truth.
The more I express what I truly feel and know, the more I break the bondage these men of science and war have on my mind, body, and soul. The more I express my truth, the freer, stronger, and more powerful I become, and that can help others do the same.
Sparrow
*Writing Down The Bones – Freeing The Writer Within. by Natalie Goldberg
Drawing by Sparrow
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