Tiny Stories: Why I Write

Thanks to Linda Caroll this micro-essay through her Tiny Stories prompt.

I write because certain questions keep returning to me. How do people live with illness? How do they make sense of uncertainty? At what point does experience become a story someone can carry?

I am drawn to the moment when a person begins to put language around what has happened to them. Facts alone rarely capture the experience of illness. What lingers is the meaning people create from it; the way a life is reinterpreted, reshaped, and sometimes reclaimed through telling.

Writing is where these fragments begin to gather for me. Research, advocacy, conversations with patients, moments that stay in the mind long after they occur. When I write, patterns start to emerge that I could not see before.

Julia Cameron calls this the “vein of gold,” the thread that runs through everything we create. In my work, I believe that stories change how we understand illness and each other.

I write to follow that thread wherever it leads, trusting that somewhere in the act of telling, experience becomes something we can recognise in one another.