I have always been interested in stories: the ones we are told, the ones we inherit and the ones we quietly construct in order to make sense of what has happened to us. Some stories are spoken aloud so often that they begin to feel like facts. Others live beneath the surface, shaping our understanding of ourselves without ever being fully examined. They tell us who was good, who was difficult, who was responsible, whose needs mattered and which parts of ourselves needed to be hidden in order to remain loved, safe or included.
This is one of the reasons writing can matter so deeply in therapy. It gives us an opportunity to become curious about the stories through which we have learned to understand our lives. Not so that we can replace an uncomfortable story with a more flattering one, but so that we can look again. We can ask where the story came from, whose voice has been given authority within it and what may have been left outside its edges. We can begin to notice the difference between what happened and what we were taught it meant.
I sometimes think about the story of Eve in this context. It is one of the most familiar stories in Western culture: a woman, a tree, a serpent and a forbidden fruit. Eve reaches for knowledge and, in the version many of us inherited, this becomes the beginning of humanity’s fall. She is curious, and her curiosity is made dangerous. She wants to know, and the consequences of that wanting are held against her. Over centuries of retelling, Eve has become a warning about disobedience, temptation and the risks of a woman stepping beyond the boundaries drawn around her.
But stories are never only what they appear to be. They are also shaped by the people who preserve them, interpret them and decide what they are supposed to teach us. What happens if we approach Eve with curiosity rather than judgement? What if reaching for the fruit was not simply an act of corruption, but an awakening? What if Eve’s desire to know was an expression of consciousness, agency or a refusal to remain innocent at the cost of understanding? What if the question is not whether she was good or bad, but why her curiosity became the part of the story we were encouraged to fear?
Writing allows us to sit with questions like these without rushing towards a single, tidier answer. It creates room for uncertainty. A story that once appeared fixed can begin to open, and within that opening we may recognise something of ourselves. Perhaps there are parts of our own lives in which curiosity was treated as disobedience. Perhaps we learned that asking why would make us troublesome, ungrateful or disloyal. Perhaps we were encouraged to accept the family account of an event, the cultural definition of success, or the role we had been given without examining whether it was true for us. Perhaps, like Eve, we discovered that knowledge can come with a cost, especially when what we come to know disturbs an established order.
This is where authorship becomes important. To think of ourselves as authors of our lives does not mean pretending that we have complete control over what happens to us. We do not choose every circumstance, loss, illness, injustice or inheritance. Many of the most significant chapters of our lives begin without our consent. Nor can we simply rewrite painful experiences and make them disappear. Authorship is not the same as control. It is the gradual recognition that, even when we did not choose the events, we may still have some agency in how they are understood, held and carried forward.
In therapy, writing can help us reclaim that agency. We might return to an old memory and allow the person we are now to meet the person we were then. We might write from the perspective of the child who was never asked what they needed, or the adult who can finally see how much that child was trying to survive. We might describe an experience in the third person and notice how differently we respond when the life on the page appears to belong to somebody else. We may find compassion where there was previously only criticism. We might write a letter that will never be sent, give language to an anger we were not permitted to feel, or record a dream whose images seem to understand something before our conscious mind does.
The page can hold contradictions which conversation sometimes moves past too quickly. We can love someone and remain wounded by them. We can understand why a person behaved as they did without deciding that their behaviour was acceptable. We can feel grateful for parts of our inheritance while choosing not to pass all of it on. Writing does not require us to resolve these tensions before we are ready. It allows one truth to sit beside another.
I encountered many of these same questions while working with the stories explored through A Story of Spice – a product crafted for the museum sector which aims to re-tell the story of the spice trade through a decolonised lens. Spices can appear to be simple, everyday things: ingredients stored in jars and tins, added to food for warmth, colour or flavour. Yet every spice carries a history. Behind the familiar contents of a kitchen cupboard are stories of land and climate, migration and memory, cultivation and trade. There are family recipes carried across borders, knowledge passed between generations and flavours capable of returning somebody, in an instant, to a kitchen or a country they once knew.
There are also histories of empire, extraction and colonialism. The movement of spices around the world was not shaped only by a generous exchange of food and culture. It was also shaped by conquest, exploitation and the desire to possess what belonged to other people. The versions of these histories most commonly told have often centred explorers, merchants and empires, while the people who grew, harvested, cooked with and understood the ingredients were pushed towards the margins. Their knowledge travelled, but their names and voices did not always travel with it.
The people who get to tell the story are the ones who had the means to write it down.
This feels deeply connected to therapeutic writing because both ask us to become attentive to what sits behind the version of a story that appears most visible. Who has been allowed to speak? Who has been described by somebody else? Which experiences have been treated as central, and which have become a footnote? What has been renamed, repackaged or separated from its origins? Who benefits from the story being told in this particular way?
These questions can be asked of histories, but they can also be asked of our own lives. Families, like cultures, develop official accounts. There may be stories about the reliable one, the sensitive one, the successful one, the selfish one, the peacemaker or the person who always causes trouble. These descriptions can become so familiar that nobody remembers who first created them. Yet a label is not a whole person. The “difficult” child may have been the only person expressing that something was wrong. The “strong” one may never have been offered the possibility of being vulnerable. The “quiet” one may have held an entire interior world that nobody thought to ask about.
When we write, we can return to these inherited descriptions and examine them with greater care. We can ask whether the person named in the story would recognise themselves within it. We can wonder what was happening beyond the frame. We can notice how power operates through language: who gets to name, who is named and whose interpretation becomes the accepted truth.
This does not mean that every inherited story is false, or that our task is to uncover one definitive account that will finally explain everything. Memory is complex. Every person sees from a particular place, including us. The purpose of curiosity is not to cross-examine ourselves until we produce a perfectly accurate record. It is to loosen the grip of certainty enough that other possibilities can breathe.
There is a particular kind of gentleness in saying: perhaps there is more to this story.
Perhaps the behaviour I learned to call weakness was exhaustion. Perhaps what looked like failure was a refusal to continue living in a way that caused harm. Perhaps the part of me I have called too much was trying to make an unmet need visible. Perhaps the body that seems to have betrayed me has been communicating in the only language available to it. Perhaps the ending I still grieve also marked the beginning of a life I could not yet imagine.
Curiosity changes the quality of the attention we offer ourselves. Instead of asking, “What is wrong with me?”, we might ask, “What has happened here?” Instead of demanding, “Why can’t I get over this?”, we might wonder, “What is this experience still asking me to understand?” These are not clever substitutions designed to make pain disappear. They are different ways of standing beside ourselves. One begins with accusation; the other makes room for relationship.
Writing can slow this process down enough for us to hear what is often lost in the speed of ordinary life. A sentence may surprise us. A word may appear repeatedly. We may begin with one subject and discover that we have been circling another. Sometimes the most important thing on the page is the part we keep avoiding, the detail we minimise, or the sentence we write and immediately want to delete. At other times, writing is simply a way to accompany ourselves without requiring revelation. Not every page needs to contain an insight. Sometimes it is enough to record the weather, the shape of a leaf, a dream fragment or the feeling of drinking tea in a quiet room. Attention itself can be restorative.
Like spices, our lives contain many distinct elements. Some are sweet, some bitter, some warming and some difficult to touch without feeling their intensity. They do not lose their individual qualities when they are brought together, but their relationship to one another can create something new. A life is not made meaningful by removing every painful part. Sometimes meaning arises from discovering how the different parts belong to the whole.
Perhaps that is what authorship offers us: not the fantasy of a blank page, but a more conscious relationship with what is already there. We inherit language, histories, bodies, families, cultures and beliefs. We inherit stories about gender, goodness, work, love, belonging and what a worthwhile life is supposed to look like. Some of these inheritances nourish us. Some constrain us. Many do both. Through writing, we can lay them out before us and decide what we want to examine, honour, question, transform or put down.
We can also begin to notice the stories that are still being written. The self is not a finished text. We are always responding to new knowledge, changing circumstances and different ways of seeing. Eve’s hand remains extended towards the fruit. The spice continues its journey from soil to kitchen. The old family story meets a new question. Something that once seemed certain becomes more complex and, perhaps, more alive.
Writing matters because it helps us participate in this unfolding. It allows us to become more than the character we were assigned within somebody else’s account. We can become the witness, the questioner, the interpreter and, slowly, the author. We may not be able to choose every story that reaches us, but we can become curious about what it has asked us to believe.
And sometimes, in the pause between one sentence and the next, we discover that another telling has been waiting for us all along.