Finding the Beauty in Loss
In 2022, the love of my life, my best friend and person, died unexpectedly after surgery. I felt as though the floor of my life had dropped out from under me. I was in free-fall and didn't know how to react. So, I did what writers do — I opened a Google doc on my phone and started writing:
Dear Johnny,
You died.
How dare you.
Karen
In the simplest of terms, I embraced my pain and anger over an unimaginable loss and jumped straight into the truth — no euphemisms like "passed away," no soft "I miss you."
Those simple words kickstarted a daily writing routine that helped me to heal. Each day, I wrote a letter to John. I let myself write freely without editing, putting whatever came into my head onto the page. It wasn't always pretty. Sometimes, my thoughts embarrassed me. Sometimes, the words I put down were excruciatingly raw and left me in tears. But they were tears that ultimately proved cathartic.
Can you write your way through trauma
Writing about traumatic events isn't always beneficial. If you focus solely on the events, you're likely to stir up some difficult emotions. And writing is often a solitary activity, you likely won't have someone to guide you out of the darkness you've stirred up.
Simply rehashing events isn't a path to healing — finding meaning in them is.
Research has shown that the real magic happens when we start connecting the dots, transforming raw, challenging experiences into something we can make sense of and learn from. When we process our experiences on the page, that in turn reduces our stress and may even strengthen our immune systems and physical health. There's an incredible mind-body connection forged between the pen and the page.
We're all trying to make sense of life's curveballs. Whether it's losing someone we love, watching our steady job vanish overnight, or dealing with serious injury, we desperately want to understand why things happen to us.
I remember talking with a friend who went through a tough divorce. She told me how writing in her journal felt like finally exhaling after holding her breath for months. That's exactly what happens when we put our emotional struggles down on paper — we're not just venting, we're actively working through the experience.
Think of emotional writing like cleaning out a wound (stay with me on this slightly gross but useful metaphor). When you get a cut, you have two choices: you can keep poking at it anxiously, which only makes things worse, or you can clean it out properly and let it heal. Writing about your emotional pain works the same way. Instead of letting those thoughts spin endlessly in your head like a hamster on a wheel, you give them structure and meaning through words.
And the best news is that you don't have to be Hemingway to benefit from this. The only requirement is honesty with yourself and the willingness to put those difficult feelings into words. Your story matters, and writing it down might just be the first step toward healing.
