Shovel to My Soul

I thought I hadn’t written for a while.

But that isn’t true.

I’ve journalled every morning. The habit never left. The pages filled. Even while building the website, even while thinking in logistics and structure and sensible adult decisions.

But something was missing.

I was writing… without digging.

Since going deeper with The Artist’s Way, my journalling shifted. It stopped being organised thought and started being semi-subconscious excavation. The kind of writing that surprises me halfway down the page. The kind that reveals what I didn’t know I was carrying.

This month, I stayed on the surface.

Practical. Productive. Forward-thinking.

Useful… but not deep.

And I didn’t realise how much I had come to rely on the descent.

There’s so much stitched into us by society. Expectations. Efficiency. Performance. The quiet pressure to always be “doing something useful.” It’s subtle. It becomes part of our skin if we’re not careful.

Writing is how I unpick those stitches.

My pen and paper have become my shovel to my soul.

They dig beneath the sensible. Beneath the polished. Beneath the part of me that knows how to build a website and tick off tasks.

They take me back to something human.

This morning, I dropped back in.

No agenda. No outcome.

Just digging.

And halfway through, I realised these pages aren’t optional for me anymore. They’re not a phase. Not a productivity trick.

They are how I come home to myself.

I wasn’t missing writing.

I was missing depth.