Why I Write: A Leaf in a Storm

When I was working at DigitalOcean, I had the opportunity to write for an online publishing platform. Once I had selected a topic, I entered a frenzy of brainstorming, outlining, writing, soliciting feedback, rewriting, fear, uncertainty, doubt, and triumph. Thoughts in my mind ebbed and flowed and married and divorced and battled and clashed until by sheer force and repetition they were woven into a cohesive story. When the storm subsided, I submitted Keep Calm and Respond: A Beginners Heuristic to Incident Response. I was so proud of the first publicly published piece of my career that I sent it to an industry voice whose writing I diligently read and take to heart. I was thrilled when they responded and their feedback only added to my bubbling sense of accomplishment. With that feedback, they also gave me a gift: a warning.

Don’t let the quality and success of this piece discourage you from writing again out of fear of not replicating your results.

I took their words to heart in the moment, making promises to myself to keep trying. It’s been 3 years.

Watching my idea form and morph into something tangible was an addictive experience. The process of creation is exhilarating. It doesn’t matter that it’s not original, not everything needs to be. Results don’t do justice to craft. Creation is about process: the idea, the rough shapes, refining the details, steps forwards and backwards. For a long time, I thought the addictive quality was hearing others appreciate and validate my work, but now after what I can only describe as a life-changing 3 years, I realize that I didn’t love my piece. I loved its creation. And thus, for all the wrong reasons, I didn’t write until now.

When I got laid off in 2023, I made a commitment to myself to find what I truly loved before I found a new job. I am forever grateful for the privilege to have given myself that time. I settled on writing and drawing and bought the domain leafinastorm.com as a commitment to myself to write and write publicly. Writing content on the internet is no longer as straightforward as it used to be. There are a plethora of ways to put yourself out there and they all come with their own risks and effort. I let myself get caught up in the complexities of putting myself out there instead of focusing on having something to say. I did a lot of drawing in my hiatus, and no writing. I eventually did find a job; I became a mother.

Every parent will tell you that becoming one will change your life. I used to roll my eyes at them because I was unable to understand the magnitude of the change. Now I roll my eyes at that version of myself. Thanks to an incredible support system, motherhood helped bring out the best in me. I learned to slow down, be patient and give grace to my little critter, to others, and to myself. Most importantly, I learned to appreciate the process. Raising a child is a lot of repeating the same motions in hope that one day something will stick. You don’t see the results of your work for weeks, months, and years. You must love and trust the process or you will get frustrated very quickly.

Parenthood is not all sunshine and rainbows. Not only do you contend with keeping a tiny human alive, happy, and thriving, your path to parenthood can make it very easy to feel like you’ve lost yourself. As a birthing parent, I’ve had to wrangle and come to terms with the changes to my brain and body that are frustrating on a good day and devastating on a bad one. As the perceived primary caregiver by my little one, an outsized amount of my attention ends up being focused on the needs and care of someone other than myself. This transition was and is hard for me, and I am so very privileged to have a partner who carries equal burden for childcare and a support system for the both of us to make it easier.

Professionally, I got a new job very close to the time I began my journey into parenthood. I had a pretty good idea of who I was, how I worked, what I wanted, and what I brought to the table. That all changed for me during this transition and I spent a lot of time frustrated with the difference between who I was at work before and after becoming a mother. I’m not just practitioner of resilience and anti-fragility professionally; these are the lenses through which I interrogate my life and my world. The natural path to resolving this toil was to reflect on these feelings, similar to an incident retrospective. I thought a lot about what I loved, what I hated, what made me happy, what made me unhappy and in the end I realized that I missed writing.

In How To Take Smart Notes, Sönke Ahrens says that humans organize thought through writing, and thus writing is the medium for research, learning, and study. For me, writing is all these things, and most of all a vehicle for clarity. One of my favorite comics to read is a comic from The Oatmeal about running. Matthew Inman, the creator of The Oatmeal, describes running as a way to silence the world around him and create clarity. Writing does the same for me.

The world demands my attention and it takes more and more energy to tune it out and sort out what is important and what is not. The media tells me to be worried about everything. When he’s awake, my child, rightfully so, needs attention and validation. My home is a losing battle to entropy that is fought in bursts of laundry and furious cleaning. At work, there is always the next thing to be built yesterday and a barrage of sad trumpet noises as my pager goes off. When I lay down at night, it’s not uncommon for me, in a moment of quiet, to feel the full force of the thoughts moshing in my head. My thoughts do not swirl and swim nicely; they rage and fight and spiral into a hurricane of emotions that threatens to blow me away and drown me in them.

So, for this reason I write. I write to take the mess in my head and channel it into the process of creation. I write to make something that threatens to unravel me into something that I love. I write to mute all the things that worry me, the things that could go wrong, and all the ways that the systems of my life could fail. I write because I am not the storm, I am the leaf.