The Writing Path

A companion to the unfolding of one's inner world

As a platform, Substack is absolutely genius! It combines the very best of every social media platform I have encountered. It provides the all important community building, professional networking, responsiveness, generation of sharable images and all powered by a complete passion for writing. I’ve heard of Substack for a while but I’ve been up and down with my health for a couple of years and didn’t have the headspace to look at it. Well…. now I have and I’m in love!

Writing, you see, is where it all began for me. In 2010, I was entering my 40’s and joining the world of the self-employed. I was also very much facing the midlife woes experienced by many Gen Xers at that stage of life; a painful divorce, tweenagers and teenagers in the house and a long cultivated loathing of micro-managing jobsworths. I was also very aware that all that I hadn’t dealt with yet, was coming up for air and life was never going to be quite the same again. I left my job with no idea about what I would do next and hungry mouths to feed as a single parent, but the pain I felt emotionally at this time, lent itself beautifully to embarking on furthering my journey of recovery through writing.

I started blogging. What’s not to love about blogging? This entailed writing about 500 words of whatever you liked at a time when the internet lacked today’s noise and bluster. The world of social media was oh so kind back then and eminently generous by comparison of the social media of the day. I wrote about my break up to start with which slowly morphed into writing about the traumatic events of my childhood and then my recovery from it.

From there I started to write books, largely (and I don’t jest), because someone bluntly said to me ‘you’d better write a book.’ I hadn’t even thought about writing a book but sure enough, my first non-fiction book was written back in 2012. I chose to share women’s journeys of recovery and self-published. I had a book launch and it was fabulous! Soon after, my next book was written which I also self-published. This book was called The Brightness of Stars and shared stories of care-experienced adults. Sharing stories and building communities within my books has always been very important to me. Alongside my writing, I was training and speaking on working with the legacy of trauma having spent the 20 years prior working in Children’s Services and Education. I never stopped writing.

In 2020, a week into the COVID lockdown, I was approached by Routledge to again, consider sharing stories but they wanted the book to be written in a conversational style having loved my podcast. This led to the publication of Conversations That Make a Difference to Children and Young People being published in 2021. In 2022, they published The Brightness of Stars as a 3rd Edition which required a lot of updating and tidying up. That’s the thing about self publishing, there’s no editor, no indexer, no in house font choosing team and no front cover artist.

In 2020 I also started my PhD which completed early in 2024 and Weaving a Web of Belonging (2025) was published, underpinned by the research I had undertaken. My next book is out in December 2025 and will form part of the ‘Conversations’ series and is called Conversations that Make a Difference for Practitioners.

What started as a healing modality has become an integral part of my life, my work and my passion. In the last 15 years from a writing perspective, I have ran ‘writing for healing’ groups, written endless courses and training sessions, written 5 books, been taken on by a publisher, continue to write short articles like this one, completed a MA and then a PhD. Writing writing writing. I do also continue to run online full-day sessions on writing non-fiction because I want everyone who wants to write a book, to write one! In other words, I love writing! It has been a beautiful gift and Substack supports this love I have. We may have only just found each other, but I’m besotted.

Why am I telling you all this? Because maybe you’re not long into your writing journey and it’s good to hear how other people have gone from amateur blog writer to published writer and academic writer. Or maybe you’re thinking about how writing supports your own healing and recovery journey. Whatever it is you take from this article, we’ve arrived at a place where I’m writing and you’re taking the time to read my words and I am deeply grateful. Finally, if you’d really like to consider why you write, read Orwell’s Why I Write. Now that’s a man who could write!