Welcome to Writing a New World!

A bit about what I'm hoping to do here...

Welcome to Writing a New World! My name is Elizabeth Marian Charles, and I am a writer, teacher, student, and mother who is fascinated by transformation and how people use writing to process and interpret pivotal transitional moments in their lives including birth, death, motherhood, loss, grief, illness, trauma, and more. I am so fascinated by this, in fact, that I'm studying it through a PhD in English Rhetoric and Composition. I'm so excited to share some of the insights I've gained in my personal life, creative work, and research.

At some point in all our lives, something we believed was integral and essential—perhaps an identity, persona, belief, external validation, job, relationship, material possession, or structure—is stripped away from us, often in spectacular and heartbreaking fashion. In the archetypal language of Tarot, these moments are The Tower, in which the structures of our life crumble around us. Tower moments are crises, big and small, that bring about a reckoning. There is a before and an after: some part of our lives has changed irrevocably, and some part of how we moved through the world is forced to shift or transform entirely.

Tower moments are challenging, painful, and often full of deep grief—but the secret and the gift of The Tower is that something about the building was fundamentally unsound all along. Perhaps the foundation was not solid; perhaps the crossbeams were faulty; perhaps there were cracks in the walls that never would have held through the next storm. I believe these moments of crisis, rupture, and collapse are portals, inviting us into a new version of self if we have the support and courage to accept. Often, our first instinct is to rebuild what was already there, but magic happens when we imagine something new we couldn't have even dreamed of before—when we allow ourselves to transform.

I've had quite a few of these experiences in my own life, including a mental health crisis beginning in my late teens that included an eating disorder, suicidal depression, and self-harm; my father's diagnosis with brain cancer, treatment, and eventual death in 2020; and the birth of my son during the pandemic, seven months after my father's death while I was still deep in grief. In 2022, my second pregnancy ended in a traumatic, life-threatening miscarriage, shifting these other experiences into perspective as part of a larger pattern I saw in my life and in the world. I realized the gift of these terrible times in my life was an opportunity to heal parts of myself I hadn't even realized were broken and become a version of myself that was more authentic, more true to the life I dreamed of—the version of myself I imagine my soul came here to be. It wasn't easy or pretty, and it certainly didn't happen overnight. But in the aftermath, I made decisions that previously had not been available to me and opened myself up to new possibilities, reimagining what I wanted my life to be or what I even believed it could be.

I noticed something else: every time my life fell apart, I turned to writing to process and interpret what had happened to me. I have always written to make sense of the world, but the writing I did during those times had an urgency, a closeness to the bone, as if I was actively trying to save my own life. Perhaps I could only become the person I needed to be on the other side of those experiences by writing about them. For me, writing is transformation.

It stands to reason that if something is true for me, it's true for someone else. Maybe that's why you're reading this. Maybe you've had similar experiences, and you would like to make sense of them. Maybe you're in one of those moments now. Perhaps something happened to you and there is a story you've told yourself, like "I am broken" or "I will never recover from this." Perhaps the stories other people or society tells about this experience don't quite resonate, but you don't know what other story to tell. When our lives become unintelligible to us, sometimes a theoretical lens or framework can bring our experiences into focus, or symbols or archetypes might light a path forward—yet often, we don't know where to begin. But I know this: it's never too late to tell a different story, and it's never too late to transform through the telling of that story. We are always becoming. We write ourselves into new ways of being, and in so doing we create a new world for ourselves, our loved ones, and the larger collective.

I would like to invite you to join me as I explore writing as transformation. I plan to post outside the paywall for a few months as I figure out a rhythm that works for me, but eventually I’ll add exclusive content for paid subscribers such as monthly online circles via Zoom. I will also be offering classes, workshops, and writing challenges—more to come on that soon. I am so excited you are here, and I can't wait to connect!