The Words that Couldn’t Wait

There are days when words arrive like polite guests. They knock gently, wait for me to answer, and sit quietly until I’m ready to pour them a cup of tea and put them down on paper (or type them out).

And then there are other days.

The manic days.
The ones where words don’t wait at the door—
they kick it down.

When I’m manic (or hypomanic), writing becomes less of a choice and more of a survival instinct. The urgency is electric, like my brain is a lightening storm, trying to set fire to every blank page it can find. The sentences come in floods, not streams, spilling across margins, crawling up the edges of notebooks, crashing into one another in a rush to exist. If I don’t let them out, I feel like I might explode (literally!).

It’s messy.
It’s restless.
It’s unstoppable.

But it’s also holy.

Storytelling, even in those moments, has saved my life more times than I can count. The page becomes my pressure valve, the only place that can hold the heat when my mind is burning too bright. Writing, especially when manic, isn’t neat or polished. But it is (for me at least) survival ink. Words that couldn’t wait. Words that demanded to live outside of me before I broke apart under their weights.

Looking back, those frantic scribbles often became the seeds of my best work. They remind me that writing isn’t just an art form for me. It’s a lifeline. When I’ve been at my lowest, storytelling has been the rope I’ve held onto. When I’ve been at my highest, it has been the anchor that keeps me from floating into oblivion.

Writing hasn’t just helped me survived. It’s helped me thrive. It’s given shape to the chaos, meaning to the mess, beauty to the broken.

The words that couldn’t wait taught me patience. They taught me presence. They taught me that even in the most unsteady seasons of my mind, I can create something steady, something lasting, something true.

So I write.

I write when the words tap softly at my door, and I write when they break that door down. Because either way, the page is where I meet myself.

Wild. Raw. Imperfect.
Alive.