The Healing Power of Publishing Memoirs

Over the last eight months, I took a break from publishing anything new — apart from the odd piece here and there for a handful of writing competitions. And to be honest, after wrapping up the competition submissions and these past couple of years, trying to make it as a writer, I felt totally wiped out.

I guess I’d also given so much of my energy and focus into my KDP journals and updating my poetry book: adding new poems and a brand-new cover; it looks and reads like a real book now!

Summertime came, and I let go and spent time at the beach as well as hunt for non-writing work options, but when it was time to come to think about drafting new pieces, I froze. I couldn’t do it.

As each week passed, nothing stirred in me. I kept freezing. More weeks passed. I’ve lost count of how many now. Then it smacked me in the face what was wrong: I‘ve lost confidence. In my writing abilities and what I have to offer, it doesn’t feel enough. I don’t feel ready.

With little progress and many closed doors, perhaps this is normal — to feel so deflated that there’s just nothing left. I felt like one of those vacuum storage bags; everything was sucked out of me.

I dipped in and out of my old articles to repolish them and ever so slightly cringed at how bad they read: the lack of flow and the multitude of grammatical errors.

But I only felt embarrassment for a moment. I replaced it with a quiet internal celebration of how far I’ve come since writing those pieces. Isn’t that wonderful, though — that we’re always getting better at our craft!

Getting to the point here.

Some of these pieces I polished up were traumatic memoirs that I’d openly and honestly shared: the unpacking of ancient wounds and feelings of shame. I’d felt vulnerable at the time. I meticulously combed through each paragraph to trim up the edges and elements that didn’t need to be there. Too verbose with too many unnecessary details here and going off on a tangent there. There was a lot of that.

There were more chunks I wanted to delete, even more as I came across hurtful events and circumstances that had been a massive part of my life. They didn’t seem so relevant now, as they didn’t appear to hurt as much as they once had, as I read through them. They didn’t hold the same connotations as they had when I originally wrote them.

I was able to reflect on how penning these memoirs invited me to return to myself. It didn’t happen overnight, but over the course of a couple of years, yet as the rigid psychological layers crumble away to deeper layers, epiphanies are emerging, and healing is happening. The shedding of the false ego. My mind, as are my thoughts, is fragmented, but as the old wounds dissipate, authenticity will return, and my mind will settle.

Sharing my stories genuinely connected me to you — to our human experience — to the uncertainty of life. Writing helped me process what happened, transforming wounds into the excavation of who I was born to be. The real me that’s been submerged underneath the rubble of wounded dynamics — a mound of silent screams and unmet needs. That’s what I also love about poetry, it’s like painting a scream or painting a dream. A mystery, but a joy.

© Chantal Weiss 2025. All Rights Reserved

My poetry book: In Search of My Soul