THERAPY IN WRITING | WITH KAYA COCOE

 

THERAPY IN WRITING WITH KAYA COCOE

How writing becomes your best therapy session without regrets.

Now, I am going to be honest, writing is hard work because first you have to sit with yourself even face-to-face with a loving God. It is brutal to say the least for the very things that you are hiding become bare and exposed to the winds of change. It isn't for the faint nor the ones who call themselves mighty. 

It is a process of learning about yourself the harsh pains, realities, and structures of struggle that you ignored until this moment comes. The way I picture it is this: you are the writing and not the writer.

Hurts...doesn't it?

You thought you were brilliant in all the way round and downright a genius of words, but you never thought this is for you and not merely your readers. It is the painful realization that you are your own audience. While writing, Girl, be bitter. Girl, be wise. I took into account my own life. How? Well, it wasn't planned. As I read my first draft by another name, then the second by a different name and the third by another title...God was showing me a perspective that I was going to feel this book. I was about to edit something that would change me. 

This is personal, but necessary.

I felt my own foolishness ride in the corners of the character, Elix. I felt the unjust claims of my mistakes unravel before me. The way a shortcoming comes about even shorter than reaching for perfection. I felt the ache of not adhering to warnings said long ago. 

I tell you of a truth I was reading a story about me. Maybe, you will see it too. Possibly, in your own writing you have therapeutically sat before God, pulling back layer after layer. The doubts often creep in after a while and you feel less than chosen, called, or named. It is the subtle ways of falling apart.

I didn't embark on writing this story to tell everyone my business, no...just the opposite. As I cleverly or rather sheepishly put together this manuscript I had hoped it would help other people especially the young adults or teens gearing for life ahead. 

Instead, it became a peek into my life, my flaws. It turned on me. Fast.

So, I embraced the hit on the cheek so to speak and offered the other. God was doing something of a miracle as I wrote. He was placing me in a fictional world to deal with my own inner insecurities. He made out the story's frame to be a chapter in my life. Oh, how my teeth grinded and my heart pounded at the thought of me sharing it!

Girl, be bitter. Girl, be wise. crafted in my God-given imagination, is a story of venturing out into your mistakes. The very soft ones...the ones no one not even yourself notices. It is in my younger years did this book speak volumes. The story follows, Elix with her ancestral gifting, protection and rarity of a gift--a calling. 

She then forfeits her own understanding for a boy. Noting, that she is having second thoughts on traveling with him across to the other island, after being exiled; Elix discovers why she should have listened to her aunt. Set in a cozy fantasy telling, we journey with Elix as her coming-of-age is foretold before your eyes. How a simple turning of the head to a warning so ancient it makes you question your own justified rebellion. But what if you did all of that to save someone? What then?

I have come to this even though we may be well-meaning our purpose, our calling, and our secret chambers of gifts are to be taken with heed. There is a saying to this concept:

"Do not cast your pearls before swine..." Matthew 7:6

It hits different. Now.  

MEET THE BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR:

Kaya Cocoe