When Healing and Writing Are Rebellious

and why you should embrace it

If you’re new to The Rebel MFA Way, welcome! This is a cross genre essay where I talk about the process of designing your own rebel MFA degree and my method of writing fiction to heal. You can learn more about The Rebel MFA Way here and you can find out more about Writing Fiction to Heal here.

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Last week, I published the first draft preface for my next nonfiction book, The Rebel MFA Way: Designing Your Path to a Creative Education, but I’ve been riding the “rebellion” line long before I had the idea for my Rebel MFA Degree. One of the first things I learned during my trauma recovery journey is that healing… is pretty damn rebellious.

I know, it seems counter-intuitive, right? How can we see healing as anything but great? And on the surface, yes, people will often use tenderness and compassion when talking about healing. But no one talks about the grimy, gritty part of healing. The part of healing that requires you to stand up for yourself. To find your voice. To cauterize the wound and begin anew. To let go of people and things that no longer serve you. And often, these changes have interpersonal consequences.

As a trauma survivor, one of my coping mechanisms was people pleasing and perfectionism. If I said, “yes,” all the time and if I was “good enough,” or “the best” at something, then I would be worthy of love, attention, praise. But when I inevitably managed to drop the ball somewhere in the juggle, I would feel like a failure. A worthless, invaluable, insignificant person. For me, this feeling was terrible. But do you know who benefited from it? Authority figures who didn’t have the knowledge or understanding or desire to see what was happening. There were times in both my professional and personal life where those around me could have pulled me aside and said, “don’t you think you deserve a break?” They didn’t, though. Because they liked that I bent to their whims. That I was willing to do the dirty work they didn’t want to do. They liked the control.

But when I healed the wounds that caused my people-pleasing behaviors, suddenly, those eighty-hour workweeks and bending to every whim, saying yes to every request, stopped and I became a problem for those who wanted those behaviors back.

That’s because rebels (which you are if you decide to take steps to heal yourself) scare people. Rebels step outside the lines and make those who very much like the lines uncomfortable. I think this card from Roxan McDonald’s Spiritual AF deck sums it up beautifully.

© Knock Knock, Spiritual AF Deck

So yes, healing can be very rebellious. But talking about your healing? Your trauma? That is dangerously rebellious. We see this every.single.day.

The fear of speaking about your healing from trauma or other big life impact experiences can come from your family of origin, your culture, or even your government. Those who are currently writing about and speaking of the Israeli/Gaza situation face this very issue. But for those of us who understand the courage it takes to be a rebel and to write about what hurts, it’s worth it.

This is one aspect of why my writing fiction to heal method is rebellious. Because within the method, you are healing. You are speaking about your trauma, your life experiences and the world at large. And often, because writing can live on, it’s especially dangerous and rebellious to those who want to silence you.

Rebellion in the Industry

Writing fiction to heal is also rebellious in the world of writing. How can that be?

Because in our mainstream, product-obsessed, side-hustle society — writing (especially novels or nonfiction) means having an end goal. We’re told that to write means that surely, we all want to do something with what we’ve written. Perhaps publish and have readers. Maybe get an agent and then a publishing deal. Get a following and income from Substack. There are so many “end goals” for writing and that’s okay. I’m not saying having a goal for your writing is bad. What I’m saying is that in a world that pushes end goals, writing fiction to heal diverts from end goals.

Because the true goal of writing fiction to heal is slippery, intangible, and flexible, it does not fit within any guidelines or structures of what an end goal looks like. That’s because healing is the same way. In fact, in healing, there can’t be an end goal because there is no such thing as being “finished” with healing. It’s an ever-evolving, ever-expanding, ever-cumulative thing that requires us to be engaged with it for the rest of our lives.

So, from that angle, writing fiction to heal also follows the same logic. It’s not about having an end goal… it’s about getting the mileage from the act of writing itself.

This is one of the biggest mindset shifts I have to work with my clients on. They often come to me with an idea of what they want their time with me to look like.

“I’d like to finish this manuscript at X amount of words.”

“I’d like to fix the plot holes in this book so I can submit it to agents.”

“I want to polish this latest draft so I can put it out for publication.”

“I think I need your help fixing this character arc before I give it to beta readers.”

Those are great goals. But do you spot the issue? All of those are external, mainstream, product-based goals. Those are goals that many a storytelling coach could help with.

But it’s not usually why they come to me. Those may be the “topical” goals, but once I dig beneath those conditioned responses, I get to the heart of what my writers often really want. Things like:

“I want my character to have the sort of life I did not.”

“I want this story to normalize what I’ve been through.”

“I need my characters to take on the pain I feel so that I can function in the world.”

“I’d like for my novel to be a reclamation of my inner story.”

Those are goals that don’t have qualitative or quantifiable counterparts. That whole business rule of “how are you going to know you’ve achieved your goal or not?” is of no use here.

Because you won’t be able to answer it until you’re doing it, and even then, you will only be able to answer it as you feel it. You may write a 10,000 word short story instead of that novel you wanted, and answer “yes” to whether or not you achieved your goal.

But the beautiful thing about these intangible goals is that, unlike the mainstream, product-based end goals, you can feel them immediately. And you can repeatedly feel them because they are not limited to one specific end goal.

Mini Case Study

In working with one of my clients, Fiona, even the initial brainstorming for her writing fiction to heal novel brought up some connections and healing. With her permission, I’m sharing some of her pre-work to illustrate what can happen when you blend your reality with fiction.

What is your character’s attachment style?

My character's attachment style leans toward anxious-preoccupied. She craves closeness and intimacy due to her fear of abandonment and rejection, which stems from her childhood experiences of isolation and illness. This yearning for connection is coupled with a fear that she is not truly understood or valued, driving her to seek constant reassurance and validation from those around her.

How do you think this plays out in their relationships with family or friends?

This attachment style plays out in her relationships with family and friends through her sensitivity to their moods and behaviors, often seeing them as mirrors of her worth or the stability of the relationship. She tends to prioritize the needs and well-being of others above her own, sometimes at the expense of her emotional health, due to a deep-seated fear of being left alone or misunderstood.

How do you think this plays out in their romantic relationships?

In romantic relationships, her anxious attachment makes her clingy and she often overlooks her boundaries and needs. She struggles with jealousy or insecurity in fear that she will be abandoned.

How does all of this work around your character’s attachment style reflect or deflect from your own attachment style?

While my character's anxious attachment style is more pronounced than my own, there are reflections of my fears and desires in her behavior. Like her, I have experienced the fear of not being understood or valued, though perhaps to a lesser degree. My character's journey to understanding and healing her attachment wounds mirrors my own process of exploring and addressing my emotional patterns and fears. Through her, I can examine and articulate these dynamics, perhaps with a clarity that is harder to achieve in my personal introspection.

As you can see from this small amount of pre-work, Fiona is connecting her internal fears and attachment style to her character. She’s crafting a character that may struggle with the same issues as her, but of course will face her own set of challenges. As Fiona stated in her response about her own attachment style, working through her character also allows her to work through her own issues in a safe and distanced way.

The Curse of Labels

The other component of Writing Fiction to Heal being rebellious is something I’ve touched on in an essay called “In Defense of Autofiction” (which is a response essay to a critique essay about the label of Autofiction). What does this controversy around Autofiction have to do with Writing Fiction to Heal?

Well, a lot of stories written as Writing Fiction to Heal could be considered Autofiction. Autofiction blurs the lines between reality and fiction.

SIDENOTE: I never compare “fact” to fiction though because I don’t believe it exists in any writing. In my opinion, there is NO way to be 100% factual as humans have inherent bias. Even scientific papers are careful to admit the fallibility that comes with writing about experiments and “fact.”

So, circling back to Autofiction. The rise of this word which itself is controversial (as in some people don’t believe it’s a thing) came about to describe fiction that is largely based on reality. There are so many famous novels that would fit into this category such as, I Know Why the Cagebird Sings by Maya Angelou, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, etc.

The problem with the word is that the business of publishing and the nature of humans to want to categorize and label things.

So when something is labeled as a “memoir,” it comes with a reader contract. It says, “This is true. It happened to me and I will tell you about it.” That’s not to say that memoirists always tell the truth in their memoirs (which is another topic for another essay, someday). With fiction, the reader contract commonly says, “this is all made up but hopefully if I write it well enough, you can believe it could really happen.”

The writing industry hasn’t yet caught up with the reality that this type of writing exists and is thriving. They don’t know what to label it and it leaves readers wondering: is this true or is it false?

My answer is always: both.

Fiction can (and does) have enormous amounts of truth baked in. But it also has a lot of made up and fictionalized parts.

We humans have a hard time with paradox, which is why it’s difficult for people to think that a fiction novel can be both things: true and not true.

In that vein, writing fiction to heal is similar. In my soon-to-be published novel, Until They Burn, there is so much truth in the characters, the conflicts, the emotions. But there is also a lot of things made up about it. The main plot-line, for example.

So you see, when you get down to it, writing fiction to heal and autofiction and semi-autobiographical fiction are all the same for the experience of the author — they are writing to heal and using their own experiences as a basis for it.

The Takeaway

Writing Fiction to Heal is rebellious. But I believe every person who wants to write to heal is worthy and should feel empowered to do it — despite what society and conditioning and the status quo tells us. If I could have one wish for every writer, it would be encapsulated in this quote from Julia Cameron's The Right to Write:

“We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful form of prayer and meditation, connecting us both to our own insights and to a higher and deeper level of inner guidance as well. We should write because writing brings clarity and passion to the act of living. Writing is sensual, experiential, grounding. We should write because writing is good for the soul. We should write because writing yields us a body of work, a felt path through the world we live in. We should write, above all, because we are writers whether we call ourselves writers or not. The Right to Write is a birthright, a spiritual dowry that gives us the keys to the kingdom.”

Writing for yourself and because you want to heal is an act of rebellion against the “status quo,” and all those who wish for you to be silent. It’s an act of rebellion against those who say it can only be one or the other. Write as rebellion against those who believe you have nothing to say, because that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Everyone has a story to tell, and it’s up to YOU to tell it in only the way YOU can.