Sovereignty & Sensation

When I write, no one can interrupt me. You cannot speak over me, or cannot look through me, past me, judge my accent, or belittle me. You are not even part of it.

I recognize that what I just wrote might sound self-centered. I feel like I live in a world designed to fragment attention, to reward whoever speaks the most, the loudest, or the longest, where people listen to respond. Writing then, I suppose, is an act of radical self-possession. It is the one space I get to be uninterruptible.

Sovereignty. Reclaiming sovereignty is at the top of it. The deeper reason I write is harder to describe, and perhaps that's exactly why I need to write it out.

Virginia Woolf famously stated that a woman needed money, and a room of her own in order to write. What I understand from that, and it seems like research has since confirmed, is that creative expression requires safety, security, a protected space, where the self is not subject to negotiation. When your basic needs are met, you can self-actualize, as Maslow brilliantly taught us.

Writing gives me authority over my own narrative in a way that speaking often doesn't. I am not waiting for a pause in the conversation. I am not measuring my words to manage someone else's reaction. I simply come as I am, and lay myself on the page.

Psychologist James Pennebaker spent decades studying what happens when people write about their inner lives. His findings were groundbreaking: those who wrote about emotionally significant experiences showed measurable improvements in immune function, mood, and cognitive clarity, which seems to have nothing to do with feedback or validation, but simply because they expressed themselves. The action was enough. There was no co-regulation. It didn't require an audience. It didn't require anyone at all, just the space to do it.

Maybe that’s the point!

There are things I feel that I cannot speak. Not that they are unspeakable, but maybe speech moves too fast, and is too public. Like a feeling that lives behind the eyes, and when I speak of it, they turn into tears. Or sometimes a grieving that doesn't have its own shape yet. These things need to be lured, coaxed, not announced.

Writing is how I coax them. I reach for a word, and the word is wrong, and reaching for a better one requires me to feel more precisely, and find the middle point between what is vague and what is genuine. Writing, then, constructs the experience. It brings the thing into being, by attaching language to the sensation.

Neuroscience has a term for this: affect labeling. When we name an emotional state in language, the prefrontal cortex engages, and the amygdala, the brain's alarm center, measurably calms. Putting feelings into words is not merely descriptive, it is healing. Writing, in this sense, is not a record of what happened inside us. It is the actual happening inside us.

I want to be precise about something: the processing I do through writing does not feel uniquely psychological. It feels somatic. I write to release the shoulders, to unclench in the jaw. A particular quality of breath that arrives, sometimes mid-sentence, as though the body has been waiting for this exact arrangement of words in order to exhale.

This is not a metaphor. The body and mind are not separate systems negotiating across a barrier, but one continuous loop. When I write something true, something that has been pressing against the inside of me looking for a way out, it leaves. It exists my body, and lands on the page. It materializes in a way that it becomes visual, and undeniable.

The field of somatic psychology fully recognizes this. Peter Levine's work on trauma and the nervous system, and Bessel van der Kolk's research on the body's role in storing experience point to the same insight: healing is not cognitive. It requires the body's participation. And writing, when it is honest enough, pulls the body into the process whether we consciously invite it or not.

Sometimes I write to release, or to let a thought or feeling move through and out of me, like water finding its valley. The page absorbs what I’ve been holding. This is catharsis in its truest sense: a cleansing!

Other times I write to make something settle down, to anchor an experience that might otherwise drift and dissolve before I've understood it. Joy deserves this as much as grief. Beauty deserves it. The strange, fleeting sensation of feeling fully awake deserves to be put into language before it evaporates, because written language is one way to make things true.

Both are true at the same time. Writing literally holds the paradox, and what a cool word that is!

There is a version of writing that is always performing, imagining a reader looking over its shoulder, adjusting the tone, softening, measuring, making itself legible, comprehensible. I kinda know that version. I have written it. It is exhausting, and it is lonely in a particular way. You are present, but not really there.

The writing I’m writing about is the writing that heals, that processes, that gives the body permission to express, or expel. It’s art made with words. Writing done in the first person, for the first person (and me putting myself first).

No audience.

No approval.

No grades.

No feedback.

No interruption.

Sounds selfish. If anything, it’s the most honest thing I know how to do. To show up for myself on the page, without intermediary, and without performing. I edit myself, of course I do. I want to write correctly, comprehensibly. If it ever gets read, I want to feel seen in the most transparent way. That practice makes me more present everywhere else. More able to be with others, because I have first been with myself, and organized my thoughts, feelings and sensations.

So this is why I write. Not to be heard, but to make my experience visible. The page is mine in a way that almost nothing else is. I can materialize what would otherwise remain formless, and unrealized. I write because my body knows the difference between something spoken, and something genuinely expressed. Because writing does not just describes my inner life, it manifests it.

And as it turns out, that is reason enough.