Writing for Recovery

Sunday Assembly Edinburgh Talk -May 2026

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The following is the skeleton of a 15 minute talk at the Sunday Assembly , Edinburgh, 3rd May 2026

On the morning of 1^st December 2014, I found myself sitting on the floor of my Marchmont flat, shivering uncontrollably and unsure where the last hour or so had gone.

That morning I had woken early, gone to the kitchen in the dark to make myself a cup of tea and whilst the kettle was boiling, I became overwhelmed with a desire to sit down…. So I did.

The next time I became aware of myself, it was light, I was on the floor and what brought me back to awareness was my body’s violent shivering in the cold…

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was burnout.

My mind, body and emotions were done.

Ever wondered what the end of your tether looks like ? This was mine.

What brought me back to recovery, was writing.

2014 had been my personal annus horriblis.

A year marked with D-words

Divorce, looming debt (caused by the divorce and my stubborn refusal to deal with it) my mother’s early onset dementia, a Masters Dissertation to submit… and then the death of our beloved father in September.

Oh and I was running a business and had moved house.

And I had coped. Boy had I coped. I had coped with each part, dealt with each bit, been practical and stoic. I had moments of wild fury, but mostly I kept on keeping on. My narrative was I’m strong, self-reliant and I cope.

My 2014 Instagram feed shows a woman travelling for work, making a new home, going to art galleries, cooking good food, exercising – living my best life.

My 2014 Instagram feed did not show the unopened envelopes, the 3am wake-ups, breathless and furious, the encounters with the needy-then-nasty soon-to-be-ex husband, the heartbreaking visits to the care home…..

Then our beloved, stubborn, lovely father died unexpectedly and all my coping mechanisms, all my life curation, all my narratives weren’t enough to hold me.

Everything was changing. I had no fixed point anymore.

I found myself staring into the void and I had no words, no narrative for where I was, for how to deal with everything sliding away, for what to do or for who I was….

Everything tipped.

Many of us have a version of this story – living life to the brink in the best way we know, building up lots of denial and convincing ourselves of our own fine-ness.

Often our outside stories don’t fit our inside experiences.

We cope, we play out patterns of behaviour that help us pretend that we are OK… we are held, we are holding… we are fine…

We react to an accumulation of increasingly difficult situations in a very specific set of ways and we keep going… until something happens.

A crack, a moment, a crisis…. and the narratives we constructed about ourselves shatter fast.

That part – that crumbling of narrative of the social and emotional construction of ourselves – that’s why these days I’m interested in story.

That point – in December 2014 – was the pebble in the pond. The beginning of the end of my “coping self” narrative.

I was exhausted. I couldn’t manage anymore. I couldn’t do my usual and move or dodge or fix or sort. I had to stay put – my physical, mental and emotional system were broken and off. I needed rest, recovery – I needed a new story…

I couldn’t have told you this at the time – I was a wee husk of a thing – all stoic coping and single narrative.

The ripples that have run from that day brought me to curate less, be more authentic, understand my inner landscape better, understand when my internal narrative is pointed too far toward self-reliance…

And writing is the one thing that saved my sanity

I had always written. My Masters process had required a lot of self-inquiry, so I had a reflective writing practice… but where I was at didn’t need neat reflection on intellectual data…. I was terrified. I was all feeling and no sense. I needed to roar. I began to write expressively – not creatively, but expressively – I began to properly learn how to articulate myself on page.

if you have never come across Natalie Goldberg, go seek her out. In her twenties she published Writing Down the Bones – a treatise encouraging us all to take seriously our experiences and express every aspect of our rich inner life. Goldberg’s work sits in the Zen Buddhist tradition – dissolution of self, connection to the bigger thing. I needed just this.

There are many forms of free writing – you can follow Julia Cameron & do your morning pages, you can set a timer for gratitude practices, you can write to prompts…. I went with Goldberg because her invitation was enticing – brain to page, keep your hand connected to your awareness, don’t worry about spelling or punctuation… Go for the jugular. This was every bit of permission I needed.

I began to free-write regularly. 7 minutes to begin with. Sometimes that would feel like forever, sometimes I’d write for more than 30 minutes… I began writing my landscape – what was, what wasn’t, what’s worked, what was broken, how I felt, what I saw…

When you begin writing to yourself, for yourself, as an intentional act of practice it typically doesn’t look like a Google image of Internet journalling” does.

To begin with, the page might feel blank, or stupid, or weird.

People I work with describe feeling foolish, or afraid…..I was hilariously cautious and self-censoring.

The inside of my brain rarely looks as lovely as this image… My pages rarely look Insta-ready.

Photo by Daniel Olah on Unsplash

Swirl

In fact my expressive writing more often looks chaotic – swirls of emotion and layers of ideas and random stuff jostling for attention… that thing that pissed me off today…. The song lyrics I can remember, but not the artist…Folk I’m worried about… shit not done…angst and fury… feelings and past-present-future all colliding with possibility and colours and movement….

It’s HECTIC in there.

And that can feel intimidating to get into….

Steady

But if you start.. then keep practicing… keep writing… keep showing up in those 7 minute slots… something shifts…

and you get insight – you start to see the connections… and the swirl becomes more of a constellation. You hear yourself like a familiar tune….

You begin to see bigger skies - how things relate to other things… how this connects to that…

You understand what’s above you and what anchors you – who anchors you…

The picture becomes steadier to work with.

It’s kind of beautiful.

You stand within yourself.

Share

Part of my recovery was learning to share myself, my thoughts, my writing with others.

I held a lot of fear and shame about who I believed myself to be – Everyone loves a coper, what happens when I failed to cope?

I began to share my writing with others – trusted others, not the internet - these deep personal parts of me I’d so carefully curated out of my own story, I began to let some (very select) people see. The sad parts, the mad parts, the bits that weren’t coping.

Sometimes, my writing was so raw it made people cry.

Other times it made them laugh.

Sometimes my friends read what I thought was a revelation and went: well, obviously sweetie… which pissed me off hugely, because surely I’m a complex enigma, no?

So it was partly the writing – the expression, the articulation of self, the reclaiming and re-shaping of narrative, and it was partly the sharing- the willingness to show and share, the trust it required in others… it built connection. I became less alone.

So here is why I write ( the neat version, in bullet points)

And here’s why I write, according to my free-writing:

Sometimes I put things on paper that would set a therapist’s hair on fire – stuff I would not say in polite company. But I allow myself, encourage myself, to be unashamedly me on the page.

It allows me to be dramatic, hyperbolic & the main character on my own story…. I live in a world with plenty of people who are uncontained and loud and a LOT. I can’t compete…I don’t really want to. Writing gives me a big space to occupy… so I can then literally occupy a bigger space off page.

It genuinely makes me a better citizen.

I do my work between me & the page. I don’t add to the drama, I don’t stoke things up. I try to understand why I’m angry or frightened, or being invited to join someone else’s chaos. Writing helps me stay “clean”.

Unlike AI, the page doesn’t have a view (especially a view that has been influenced by a megalomaniac AI TECH bro playing with a large language model)

I like the quiet neutrality. I like the analogue basic-ness.

I rage & get outlandish & no one corrects or affects me.

And I hurt no-one.

I just rant or process.

I am allowed - I allow my self- to … be… or not to be

And if I’m mean to myself, or to others people, I have to notice.

No “u ok hun?” Stuff.

No heart emoji’s to make me feel better.

No judgey comments, making my double down on the bullshit I know I carry and -given space- could probably work through.

Just me, talking to some other version of me, until something seems to make sense….

I can then take a version of my crazy or doubt or certainty out to the world…. And I get to socialise it.. and that can get interesting…

I write in defiance .

I feel my world is increasingly curated, algorithmed, influenced…

I’m a smart girl….

What do I think?

What do I believe ?

How & why?

Right now, thinking for myself feels like a radical act.

If I cannot know my own thoughts, my own position - and the likely social & emotional bits that make it mine…..I’m basically just a slave to techno fascism.. and that’s just not my vibe.

12 years after getting off, the freezing floor, I know myself well. I know how to hear myself better.

I write myself little notes about Sunday Assembly talks, when the nerves rise

I write to friends when they are out-of-their own story.

I run Write Nights, a glorious winter writing community, dedicate to getting folk to write creatively and share, even when they are afraid. I run #fivelineFriday to hear stories and vignettes of peoples’ weeks. I substack and write – less often than I mean to, but I put my stuff out there…

The page to me is like a lover, a friend, a confessional, a constant source of shelter and anchoring.

If you ever feel out of yourself, if you feel to afraid to begin – too afraid of what might spill out, I’d say just try.

Take a piece of paper, write hello at the top.

Ask the page questions, what would it like to know today?

How might it help you today?

Tell it a joke. Gossip with it about your mother…

but start.

Your coping will get you so far. When it stops working, you need other things. The page forgives when you f**k up… so start there.

About me:

I”m Julie Drybrough, an Edinburgh based writing, speaker, master coach practitioner, partial to a good cup of tea, cake and conversation. Founder of Write Nights online community and writing retreats ( see more here - come & join us!) and fuchsiablue ltd - an Organisational change consultancy. I work with people to improve conversations, relationships and learning.