When everything feels broken, what do I change?

I should have been happy.

Instead, the anger was everywhere.

Career

Relationships

Purpose

Identity

Parenting

Desire

Security

Everything was broken.

I couldn’t see a way to fix anything anymore, the only solution that seemed to offer any hope was to start from scratch. To turn my whole life upside down and rebuild it. And the scale of that only option felt impossible to even begin.

As I lay there, deep in the dark freezing night, buried beneath two sleeping bags and a blanket, the ragged scrawl of my emotions lit by torch on the page, I heard a gunshot. Then another.

I looked through the frost-gnawed windscreen, wondering if I was going to die on this lonely road trip through Scotland, and just how many people would say ‘I told you so’ at my funeral.

Dead centre, a firework display was lighting up the water, rays of light shooting up from the distant Skye hills. Their reflections rippling across the waves toward me.

I crawled out from under my thermal layers, stood barefoot outside the van and watched the display.

Perhaps it was the distance between me and Skye, or the wide arch of the night lit by fireworks, or the hundreds of miles between me and home.

Everything invited me into distance. A new perspective.

The thousands of light points made patterns that seemed to speak a language I couldn’t quite hear.

Not everything could be broken.

I wouldn’t accept that.

I could see how overwhelmed I was. How everything had blurred into a painful knot. The despair that it was beyond fixing was holding me back from changing anything.

Of course I didn’t know where to start, if everything felt the same level of broken.

Of course the only solution I could see was to burn it all to the ground.

I had no idea I was about to discover that, while the temptation to change everything felt almost the only option, change didn't come from making huge decisions. It came from paying closer attention. Here, distant from everything I was and yet deeply attuned to myself, I was on the brink of understanding that the emotions I was struggling with were critical information.

I just needed a way to understand them.

I’d left home seven days earlier to drive north in my favourite season.

Early November 2018.

A long-held dream and a long-cherished destination.

I was taking my first wild-camping van trip to Scotland, a place I have visited repeatedly since I was 11. It had been three years since I last went there. The first time in 9 years I’d been away on my own, the first time I’d ever left the duty of care for our daughter to my partner. My first solo expedition in the camper van.

Leaving had been a battle. I’d been told there was something wrong with me. That no normal woman would want to leave their partner and daughter to go travelling alone.

Not just by my partner. Friends had even rung me up to tell me it was ‘odd’. Surely I’d want to take my family on a family holiday?

Our family holidays had all been hell. I’d vowed the year before I’d never go on one again. But I’d already learned that that belief was unacceptable too. I’d kept quiet about my determination to do this, but I hadn’t backed down.

Perhaps I was odd after all, I told the van as we began the long journey.

But this dream had come at a high cost. I had to enjoy it.

My diary captures the start of what was to come. Even as I left, my body knew.

Drove north, stunned at the autumn plumage on the A49. Thinking that so much of what we see on media struggles to capture the essence of experience. It’s all secondhand and stimulates mostly the longing for experience. I felt touched inside by autumn, the sheer quantity of falling, turning, dancing, passing. I could feel, even through the indomitable windscreen of the van, the breath of wind stirring life onwards, changing the tree with every breath. I could sense the need in me for change.

I drove relentlessly, long past the twilight when I lost sight of the trees. Long past the shuddering attempts to let go of home, family, work and duty. Long into the darkness, eating up the miles on my way north. The road back to some critical, bare-limbed awareness of who I might have once been. Who I might yet still be.

I drove 363 miles that day, crawling into a parking spot at Crianlarich in the early hours of the next day. Overwhelmed by the lashing rain, the noise on the van roof, the sense of my vulnerability, the irrational fear of the dark. Scribbling the start of what I hoped the trip might be.

I should have been on the cusp of a great adventure. It was, I’d told myself, and everyone around me who looked on disapprovingly at the plan, exactly what I needed to ‘sort myself out’ and come back stronger.

Perhaps the only place I could have begun to understand the choices I had to make were on a lonely road, where each day you have to choose which way to go at the next junction, and then the next.

Instead of lifting me up and fixing me, each mile, each junction, seemed to pull me more determinedly apart. The sense of choice became a freedom of avoiding choice.

Of my second night, I wrote…

Spent most of the night aware of how tight my lungs have become. How constricted my heart. Left Applecross with sadness at leaving such an austere and echoing place. The roads here are made from a darker brown shade and seem to disappear into the heath and rock. Until it rains, when they become a shimmering line of silver, curving round lochs, across braes and beckoning me on like stepping stones into the mountains.

On a solo road trip, all idea of normal disappears. I’d taken the notes for my developing WIP which would eventually become Book 1 of my Riverdell Saga, hoping to make some shape or sense of it, and I never looked at it. There was no timescale. I drove, walked, and wrote my diary. I ate noodles and fruit, and drank tea in quantities a navvy would envy. I spoke to no one, avoided everyone, dutifully called home once a day. I slept for over 14 hours a night in the long Scottish dark. I didn’t miss my daughter. Scotland seemed a place where I could be entirely myself and recall that self. I was desperate for the contact.

The early entries of that ten-day trip count the miles I drove. A relentless push to go further. Taking me all the way round the NC 500 to John O’Groats. Something in me needed to be released. And as the miles and the distance built up and I felt safely ‘far enough away’, the words came spilling out.

Resentment, bitterness, pain. Anger. Rage.

These are some of the hardest pages I have ever written in over 4 decades of being a persistent diarist.

It makes for painful reading now, to see the broken spirit I took to Scotland to try and desperately piece back together.

I didn’t look for sense, I just wrote. I wrote without fear that I might be read. I had brought a fresh notebook and, as the repressed emotions spilled out, determined I’d burn it before I returned. I wrote not knowing why the urge was so great. I wrote to release what I’d spent years holding back.

For the first six days, I let it flow. Page after page of suppressed anger. It came out like poison being leeched, spilling its bile everywhere.

A reckoning with a list of broken promises in my relationship.

A recount of all the lies told and the steady tightening vice of control.

A release of hurt from the ‘friends’ who’d turned me away when I looked for support.

As I began to curve my way back down the NC 500 toward Inverness, and the realisation that I’d have to go home impinged, I decided to abandon the route and cut across country and head back to Applecross. I parked up late at night facing the bay, beyond which Skye hulked low and haunting in the distance. I felt entirely lost, and didn’t want to be found.

Despair was setting in that my plan of pulling myself together was entirely unravelling. Maybe people were right. Maybe I’d made a mistake and going home would be terrible. With sleep refusing to come, I did something I had never done before. I pulled my diary open and began to read. My own words. Awful as it was, I needed to understand what was happening. And find a way to fix the rupture before I went home.

I felt despair, hopelessness. I cried. I couldn’t figure out where to even start. It was all so broken. Scotland had been my safe haven all my life. The place where I felt most myself. In Applecross, a place that is called Sanctuary by the locals, I had to face how very far I’d strayed from the person I thought I was going to become.

That’s when the fireworks rescued me.

I went to sleep deeply after that. When I woke the next morning, I felt illuminated.

Something had to change.

The ugly reality I’d managed to hide for years back home had finally leaked out. I couldn’t go back until I understood it. But my emotions had leaked everywhere. Without clarity over the source of the anger, my whole life had become tainted with frustration.

Here, I realised, was a source of information. My own words. My own unfettered truth.

I’d been journaling for decades but I’d never read through it before. I had never realised how much I was using the habit to hold in the feelings that I had been taught didn’t belong elsewhere.

Anger, I realised, was not allowed.

It had been openly criticised in my relationship. Never listened to or acknowledged. Blamed, judged, oppressed.

I’d buttoned it down, rerouted it, ignored it, patched over it.

Though I was desperate to be heard, I’d never learned to listen to it myself.

Making coffee as I watched the sunrise light up the western seas from over the hills of the mainland, I realised that the anger was telling me something. I drank that gritty, naked coffee and asked myself what I wanted to feel instead.

I remember that moment clearly. It was the first time in the whole trip that I felt a longing to see my daughter. I rang home, just as they were leaving for school. It was a naff conversation. She was stressed about being late already. She asked if I wanted to speak to Dad. I said no. I told her I loved her. I put the phone down and realised how much I did. It was a gut punch of a totally different feeling.

That day I went through my diary with a highlighter and began to track threads. I had begun writing only on the right side of the diary when I left home because I was planning to use the left side to make notes about my WIP.

On those spare pages I began pulling ideas and repetitions out. Reading my own story.

What emotion was I expressing?

What part of my life did it relate to?

Where was the deepest wound?

I couldn’t yet describe what I was doing, but I understood intuitively that my anger belonged somewhere, and I didn’t want to face where. It was easier to let it leak everywhere.

What clarity could my writing give me?

Writing creates mental distance.

My writing was directly connected to the distance I had travelled from my life. In every day life writing also does this, it gives us a breathing space. Somewhere to step back from the onslaught of life and release what we carry. Whether it is old, current or future weight that we are carrying, the page is a listener without judgement. A place where we can, under the right habits of journaling, be entirely honest. As I travelled further away from the life that was hurting me, on a solo trip where I had only myself to listen to, the honesty increased to a level that I could not ignore.

Why had reading my journaling helped?

Reading offers a different perspective.

Journaling on its own does not cause change, it is a release valve. Reflective journaling, the process of reading and engaging with your own words in journaling, takes you further. Reading my words gave me the ability to see patterns, in the same way that the fireworks showed me patterns. I had never done this before, always using my diary as a place to deposit all that I felt was unacceptable about me, or as a place to try and keep my sense of self together. What I couldn’t be in my outer life, I was able to hold space for on the page.

When I read it back, I was able to see how much I was living two lives. The one in reality where I was an unhappy partner, overwhelmed mum, struggling business owner. The other where I still believed in an entirely different version of my life. One where, amongst other things, I was living my childhood desire to be a writer, where I was financially secure, where I was supported in parenting, and felt connected to my partner. Most critically, a life that I felt I was co-creating, rather than one where I was being coerced into a shape that suited someone else.

Reading allowed me to understand the narrative. The story I was trying to tell myself. How I believed that I could hold all these painful truths together if I just worked harder, gave up more, twisted myself into a deeper knot. Because at the heart of my writing I was to discover a fear I had carried since childhood. That I could never, would never, put a child through the experience of divorce and its consequences that I had experienced myself. I needed to see the narrative that was truly holding me back from change. Fear of damage to someone I loved more than myself.

How did the patterns in my journaling show me where change belonged?

Patterns emerge when we step back just outside of clarity.

As someone who is short-sighted, this is something I have experienced for years. When you can see the details, you can’t see the whole pattern. It might be the way that a fabric pattern impacts a room, depending on the scale, or the strongest colour. It might be the pattern that a sunlit forest makes on a distant hill, when you can’t see the detail. I’d never been able to explain to people before how important short-sightedness was in my work as a designer. But absence of detail is the essence of pattern recognition.

Colour coding was my first step toward looking for emotional patterns. I didn’t at that point truly have the knowledge to understand why this mattered, that would come later after I trained as a coach, but it was a skill learned through years of studying literature. Looking for threads in the text and colour coding them, watching how authors bled one theme into another, and where they stood out. I had brought the highlighters to do this exact process on the notes of my own book. I had not expected to turn the skill on myself. Stepping back from the pain of the words and looking for the patterns that I made through highlighting enabled me to create understanding.

These ideas of narrative awareness and reflective practice would lead me on to professionally explore coaching and journaling in future years. How we shape stories about ourselves subconsciously, and how reflection is a practice that can change our stories.

But, at the time, it was just my first Rewrite insight.

The emotion wasn’t the problem. It was just inner data.

Data without a map.

If I could learn to read that data, I would be able to navigate the choices I understood I could no longer avoid. Journaling, something I had done for over four decades had shifted from being a place of outlet, to a tool for self-awareness and a strategy for life change.

I spent my final days away reading, highlighting, and exploring Scotland without a map. I left the NC 500 and followed my gut.

On that wild, lonely trip to Scotland I had thought that if I could temporarily escape my life, I would be able to go home and fit myself back inside it. I never did.

At the end of my trip, as I headed south, I knew that when I arrived, Home, something would change. It would have to. Because I had changed. And I began to realise slowly that that outcome was exactly what my partner and his doubting friends had feared when they counselled me not to go.

I couldn’t yet see the whole solution, but I had recognised where I could start. It wasn’t the most urgent, or the stickiest problem. It was the place where I could see that I could make progress. Where my emotions were less enflamed, and my skills could make a difference.

Where I started wasn’t with the core problem, the relationship collapse, because I wasn’t then ready to face the pain it would cause my child. But, as I began to tackle the areas that were manageable, I insisted we went to relationship counselling, which we did for over a year. I still believed we could save our family. When the time came, I was able to deal with the much greater truth that separation was really our only route, heartbreaking as that was.

Eight years on, that journal system now exists as the Rewrite Method™

Born in Rupture.

Nursed in Scotland.

Founded on the principle that emotion is navigation data.

When we don’t map that data, emotions leak across all areas of our life, leading to us feeling overwhelmed or stuck. This is how everything feels so overwhelmingly broken that we don’t know where to start.

Instead, you can map emotion across life domains to reveal where change actually belongs.

With this emotional clarity, you can design strategy to address life transitions and reclaim authorship.

Today this method exists to help others manage rupture, particularly midlife women facing multiple changes.

It has seen me through career reinvention, achieving my childhood ambition to be a published author, a global pandemic, separation from my partner, navigating co-parenting, the loss by suicide of my ex-partner, a three year legal dispute over his will, community isolation, solo parenting, my daughter’s mental collapse and recovery, her shift into homeschooling, and the slow painstaking steps I’ve taken into loving again. It’s encouraged me to train as an accredited resilience coach to deepen my understanding of why it works.

Journaling is touted as a ‘miracle’ tool for self-help. But how do we actually use journaling to make us happier?

That is the strategic question that the Rewrite Method™ of journaling answers.

Where next?

The Rewrite Philosophy

This essay explores Belief 5: Journaling creates narrative awareness.

You can start with Belief 1: Our identity is a living story.

From the Rewrite Bookshelf

The book I’d hand you immediately after finishing this essay is The Outrun by Amy Liptrot.

The Outrun explores the importance of place in creating new perspectives in our lives and leading to inevitable change.

Rewrite Today

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