What Is the One Thing You Are Most Afraid to Write? What if Writing It Saves Your Life?

My body was doing the thing again where my chest hurt. My heart was going at about twice its normal rate, and walking up the stairs left me out of breath.

It sounds like a heart attack waiting to happen, but when I really paid attention, I could feel it was something else, and so I didn’t go to the emergency room. I had suspected for sure it was something else when I’d talked to my friend Pam about it earlier in the week. We’d talked about my future, about how to break down the things I wanted to accomplish into steps to help me deal with the feeling of overwhelm, and the hurt when away for a few days.

Yesterday the heart thing was back and I so called Pam again. “Maybe something’s really wrong,” I said. “I’m just not sure what I should do. My heart is distracting me. It just keeps beating so loudly, so fast.”

Pam, a therapist, said the body tells us what the unconscious is thinking. She suggested I listen to my heart, get still and hear what it had to say.

I knew this was a good idea because I did not want to do it. My brain thought this good idea was stupid. That language of resistance often means there’s something amazing at the other side of the door, so last night I scheduled some time with my heart, my chest.

Holy shit.

Not running away was so hard.

I went into my bedroom, shut the door, told my heart I was listening, and suddenly I was filled with fury. I wasn’t sure the room was big enough to hold me, my heart, and my fury.

I took a deep breath and told myself that, in fact, the room was big enough because it was holding us in that very moment. The brain is so tricky! It will play all sorts of wild cards to try to get you not to pay attention to the body, to your deepest thoughts, to your self. The ego in that brain is a maniac! It will flip tables before it lets you sit down and enjoy the peace you can find when you let go of story.

I pulled out a notebook and drew what my chest felt like. I was trying to find a way to stay in the room because I really, really wanted to leave and walk downtown and buy some ice cream or a beer. I scribbled all over the paper. The anger got more intense. I wanted to punch holes in the wall. I used black ink and scribbled all over the paper, a pile of pissed-off spaghetti. It made me think of David Lynch’s cartoon The Angriest Dog in the World. Fury so intense words are almost non-existent.

What do you want to tell me? I asked my heart? That’s, of course, when the tears came.

My heart was right there, so ready to speak. It had been aching for me to listen, to ask it questions. It had literally been banging on the walls trying to get my attention.

My heart was afraid. Exhausted. I want you to slow down, it said. I want you to know everything is okay. Your worrying is killing me. I want to know I am safe in your body.

I cried like my heart was breaking. I cried for things I didn’t have words for, and then I was quiet.

One morning when my daughter was small, I couldn’t find her in the house. I looked everywhere. I ran outside and, far down the street, I saw her heading down the sidewalk, away from the house. I yelled her name and started running. She was wearing her nightgown and her feet were bare. I felt like I’d stepped into a movie.

When I caught up with her, I picked her up, hugging her hard. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“You don’t want me,” she said.

We hadn’t argued. Nothing unusual had happened. I had no idea why my daughter had this thought in her head. We went back home and had breakfast and I tried to show her with words and touch and food and attention that I very much wanted her.

Yesterday I was listening to Rich Roll’s podcast, and in episode #414, he interviewed the physician Zach Bush who told a story of an unusual day where he and his team brought 3 different patients back to life. One of the patients was a pastor, one was an isolated man who was dying of complication of AIDS, and another was a kid who had been born with genetic defects and was dying of complications of pneumonia because his skeleton had collapsed. Dr. Bush said that the first thing all three people said upon regaining consciousness was, Why did you bring me back? They all said that they had felt, in the bright white space into which they had entered, completely accepted for the first time in their life.

My heart told me it was exhausted from worrying. My heart told me it did not want to do this anymore, did not want to live in fear. My heart told me it was too tired to carry the weight of my burdens.

I thought about the AA meetings I had attended with friends. I thought about how I yearned to have a drinking problem so that I, too, could have the Big Book, so that I, too, could be in community with other people who had handed over their life to a higher power (I know there are other groups I could attend to have all of this—but for some reason my brain is stuck on AA. My brain wants that group.)

So, in my room, sitting before my scribbled heart, I handed it all over. I told my heart it was free. I told my heart we had help and my heart, that sweet beating muscle, softened, slowed.

I realized I don’t know the language of my body. I spend most of my time listening to the outside world, plugging into social media, podcasts, music, books, conversations with other people. I spend almost no time listening, really listening to my body until it knifes me with some kind of pain. I learned a few years ago that mice sing; we just can’t hear it with our own ears and so we didn’t know to listen more closely. What if I can’t hear my body talk to me or sing to me or lecture me or love on me all the time because I don’t know to listen, because I never learned its language?

What if what I think is silence is the gap between what I know and what is real? What if I am walking around in a magical informational musical machine and I don’t even know it because I’m so tuned into everything else around me? What if I’m missing a big part of being human: what it is really like to have a body?

I started doing this thing in Write or Die recently where I ask people to write down the worst thing about themselves. People tend to gasp, laugh, and then say, Just one thing?

After they’ve written down the one thing and read it to me, I ask them to write for a few minutes how their lives would be different if they understood the worst thing about themselves was actually the best. I say this twice because the brain often refuses to understand. The ego is doing its death fight right now, holding on to the shit show it feeds you so the ego can drag you around by your nose.

This is why I have people do this: I have found that often what makes people want to write memoir is generally the thing that is the death of their writing. Part of our brain knows we are perfect—how could it not? I mean, we just are. Jesus knew this. Whitman knew this. Mary Oliver knew this. And we love those people for saying the things we most want to hear. So many of us feel driven to write in order to find a way to feel good, to feel real, to get the story straight. But the thing is, if we really buy into our fundamental limiting belief, it will be the death of our writing because, at some point, we will be silenced by it. Our fundamental limiting belief won’t let us tell the truth, and so the lie we believe will serve as a stop sign and no more words will come.

The thing you are most afraid to write is your way into your truth. It’s the thing that is choking off your life force.

Just write it.

Your worst fear is that it will kill you, but in fact what will happen is that it will bring you to life.

What if, instead of living in service to our limiting beliefs, we live in service to the light we carry?

What then?