[2026] Neurodivergent Narratives - Writing Prompt #20

This week, our therapeutic writing makes room for the heat we usually keep quiet.

One of the hardest skills to learn in writing is not shrinking. There is a real therapeutic benefit to letting our feelings show up at full size on the page, and it can be cathartic in a way few other things are, but when we have spent a lifetime shrinking to fit other people’s ideas of who we should be, the shrinking habit is hard to switch off. Most of us, by adulthood, have years of practice in scaling our feelings down to a level the room can absorb. The exhaustion becomes “I am a little tired.” The grief becomes “it has been a hard week.” The anger becomes a careful sigh. This is a real social skill, and it has kept us safe in plenty of rooms. It does not serve us on the page. The page is not a person. It does not have feelings about our tone. It will not retreat or get defensive or punish us for being too much.

A 2006 paper by Lyubomirsky, Sousa, and Dickerhoof in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology looked at what happened when people wrote about negative experiences with different levels of emotional honesty. The participants who wrote with full emotional engagement, including feelings they had previously kept to themselves, showed significantly greater improvements in well-being four weeks later than those who wrote in a more careful, distanced style. The benefit was strongest when the writing was emotionally honest, even when the writing itself was rough or unpolished. For late-diagnosed adults who grew up performing emotional regulation as a survival skill, the act of writing without shrinking is a small but meaningful undoing of that training. If a sentence we write feels too intense, that is usually a sign we are getting close to something true. The urge to soften it is the same urge that has been editing our interior life for years. Try, just on the page, leaving it.

This week, Neurodivergent Narratives editor Lindsee invites us to take something we have been carrying at half-volume and let it move at its actual size. Here’s our second prompt for May:

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