The Writer Emerges: A Spell to Split Open
I received a voice memo from my brilliant friend Kristina Ellery (@kristinaellery) on Monday that I listened to three times because it felt like poetry. It felt like what’s happening to me too.
She said, “I just got ripped open… Like being in a cocoon and scrambled, thrashing around, completely disassembled, slowly putting myself back together. And then just like sitting there with wet wings, not sure when they’re gonna dry and not sure how to use them or what direction to go in when they are.”
I feel this ripping open deep in my core. I feel the next iteration of my life sitting just on the other side of a similar breaking open, and I am both hopeful and terrified that my wings will work. And even if they do, I am still not entirely sure what to do with them.
For me, the wings are my voice as a writer.
I remember being in college and discovering a piece of myself through writing literary analyses. I had an English professor my freshman year, Emily Rohrbach, and I remember sitting in her class one day realizing how joyful meaning-making could be. How a novel is a treasure chest of wisdom, insight into the human experience, and linguistic beauty waiting for an earnest hand to unpack it. How a poem can feel like a psychedelic experience. She helped me find joy in thinking. She made me feel like the thoughts I had — and the way I expressed them — mattered.
But I was also the student who wrote every paper the night before it was due. I would ask myself over and over why I kept subjecting myself to these all-nighters while my peers could pace themselves, could sleep, could somehow steadily produce work without unraveling first. And it wasn’t negligence that caused me to work this agonizing way. It was incubation.
When I wrote a paper, I would think about it for days. I would let ideas marinate in my subconscious. I would stir them now and then during phone calls with my mother, speaking half-formed thoughts out loud to hear what wanted to emerge. And then finally, when the deadline arrived, I would pour everything onto the page in one painful, exhausted splat and sleep like the dead afterward.
More often than not, I got an A. But the process felt so consuming, so physically and emotionally expensive, that it brought me very little joy. I think my professors could see that. When I told my advisor — an English professor himself — that I was considering pursuing a doctorate and becoming a professor, he gently suggested I might want to look into library sciences instead.
I don’t think he meant to wound me. But something in me collapsed anyway. In that moment, I lost confidence not only in my ability to write, but in my right to want writing badly enough to build a life around it. So I decided: to hell with literature. To hell with writing. I would go to dental school.
I didn’t become a dentist, but I did spend years wandering. I taught high school English. I became a pharmacist. I started a health coaching company. I kept trying, almost compulsively, to become anything else. And it’s wild to think about what felt safer than writing. I was able to admit to myself that I wanted soul mate-level love and walk away from a marriage that wasn’t that. I was able to come out publicly — to the world and to my confused and horrified mother — as a witch. I was able to admit that I wanted so much attention that I started not one but three TV shows.
All of that felt less frightening, less exposing, than saying the thing I really wanted: I want to be a writer.
I think passion asks much of us. It asks for courage, honesty, labor, conviction. It asks us to become strong enough to care for the version of ourselves being born next. Because the hardest part of birth is not the labor itself. The hardest part is tending what emerges afterward. Still, labor teaches us something important: that we can survive the breaking open.
I see now that I needed experiences that felt worthy of writing about. I needed to understand that words are spells and to learn how carefully they must be wielded. I needed to experience the particular soul-agony of not writing so I could understand how desperately I wanted to do it.
Because writing is painful for me. It is painful to place pieces of myself into the world to be misunderstood, rejected, or scrutinized. It is painful to create something and then sit beside it exhausted, uncertain whether I love it, uncertain whether anyone else will. But I know now that not writing hurts more. The alternative is not safety. The alternative is not fully living.
So here I am. Like the caterpillar, I have lost every shape I once trusted. But none of those shapes ever fit me fully anyway. I am a writer. My words are spells. I will do my best to wield them compassionately. I will do my best to let my passion serve as a spark that reminds others they are worthy of their own fire — and to help them tend it while it grows. But in the end, living is the gorgeous privilege of tending our own flame, of breaking open again and again, of showing ourselves we deserve our desire.
What version of you is waiting to emerge from your own splitting open?
A Spell to Split Open
A spell for becoming, breaking, and surviving your own emergence
Materials
A journal or blank piece of paper
A pen
A small bowl of water
Something that symbolizes who you have been
(an old photo, a piece of writing, a ring, a name tag, a receipt, a dried flower — anything that carries an old version of you)A candle
Yourself, willing to tell the truth
The Ritual
1. Light the candle.
Not because you are certain where you are going, but because even creatures in cocoons deserve a little light.
Sit quietly for a moment and notice what feels unfinished in you. What feels restless. What feels ready to crack open.
There’s no need to rush to fix it.
2. Place the bowl of water in front of you.
Water is transformation. Water is the place where shapes blur before they become something new.
Look into the bowl for a moment as if it were a mirror.
Ask yourself:
What part of me no longer fits?
What am I pretending not to know?
What wants to emerge, even though it terrifies me?
Do not force answers. Let them rise slowly.
3. Take the object that symbolizes your former self into your hands.
Thank this version of yourself. Not sarcastically. Not ceremonially. Honestly.
Thank them for surviving. Thank them for protecting you. Thank them for carrying you this far, even if they carried you imperfectly.
Then say: “If I stopped trying to stay intact…”
4. Write without editing.
Begin with the words:
You do not need to disappear for me to become someone new.
But you cannot keep me small anymore.
Then continue. Write until something true appears. Not polished. Not impressive. True.
Maybe what emerges is grief. Maybe desire. Maybe rage. Maybe relief. Maybe the smallest flicker of longing.
Trust it.
5. Dip your fingers into the bowl of water.
Touch your throat. Your chest. Your hands.
Bless the parts of yourself that will be asked to participate in your becoming:
the voice that will speak
the heart that will risk
the hands that will create
the body that will carry you through uncertainty
6. Sit for one final moment beside the candle.
Imagine yourself with wet wings. Not flying yet. Not fully formed yet. Just alive enough to become.
And understand this: You do not have to know exactly what comes next in order to begin.
Splitting open is not failure.
It is often the most honest thing a soul can do.
Closing
May you trust yourself through the unraveling.
May you survive the becoming.
May you stop mistaking smallness for safety.
And when your wings finally dry—
may you have the courage
to use them.
Download the Spell PDF to add to your grimoire here:
And if you feel yourself standing at the edge of a becoming — shedding old identities, questioning familiar roles, or sensing something new trying to emerge — a Purpose Spell is a space to explore the patterns, desires, and truths asking to take shape in your life. Together, we will map the version of you that is unfolding and gently cast toward the life, voice, and purpose waiting on the other side of your own breaking open.