Writing When You’re Holding Too Much

Grief can make words feel heavy, slippery, or impossible to find.
This space exists to give them somewhere to land, without pressure to know what to say.

You don’t have to be a writer.
You don’t have to write neatly, or often, or at all.
You’re allowed to write badly, briefly, or not finish.

You can move slowly.
You can skip around.
You can come back when the words feel safer.

Below are a few different ways in.
Choose what feels right today.

Where the Words Began

When you want to understand why writing matters here.

This space grew out of lived grief, not theory.
Writing became my lifeline after losing my daughter, Kahlia, not because it healed me, but because it gave shape to what had none.

Over time, that private writing became essays, books, and shared reflections.
Not as answers, but as witness.

Here you’ll find:

  • Personal writing and reflections
    Essays and pieces written from inside grief, love, and survival.

  • Books
    Including The Year After Kahlia and Silence: The Truth About Suicide and Those Left Behind, where writing became both record and resistance.

  • Process, not perfection
    Honest reflections on writing through loss, without romanticising or fixing it.

→ Explore where the words began

Writing When You’re Holding Too Much

When you don’t know how to talk about what you’re carrying.

Writing can offer something conversation often can’t.
It doesn’t interrupt.
It doesn’t rush.
It lets you say the unsayable, even if the sentences come out crooked.

This space is about writing as survival, regulation, and meaning-making, not performance.

Here you’ll find:

  • Why writing helps
    Gentle explanations of how writing supports the nervous system and helps process grief and trauma.

  • Ways to begin
    Journaling, fragments, letters, lists, prompts, and other low-pressure entry points.

  • Permission
    To write inconsistently. To stop and start. To write one line and close the book.

→ Explore writing when you’re holding too much

A Place to Put the Words

When you’re not sure what to do with what you’ve written.

Writing doesn’t have to stay hidden, and it doesn’t have to be shared.
What matters is choice.

This space offers different ways for your words to be held, depending on what feels safest for you.

Here you’ll find:

  • Guided writing spaces
    Courses and writing circles that offer gentle structure, support, and companionship, without pressure to share.

  • Unsent letters
    A place for the words you can’t, won’t, or don’t need to send.

  • A place to say it
    Writing that needs witnessing, not fixing.

Sharing is always optional.
Silence is allowed.
You are never required to explain yourself.

→ Explore a place to put the words

There is no right way to write here.
Start where you are.
Pause when you need.
The words will wait.
This space will still be here.

Sketch of a woman and a child holding hands, looking at a yellow balloon in the sky at night, with a background of colorful, abstract lights and a website URL at the bottom that reads 'THISISGRIEF.NZ'.