Heca Sferra — Writer

The Body Keeps the Score — and So Does the Notebook

[ Your post image ]

There's a page in my journal from three years ago that I still can't read without crying. Not from sadness — from something more complicated. Something that starts in the chest and ends with the slow realization that you survived something you weren't sure you would.

I've been thinking about that page lately. About what it means to have a record of your own unraveling — and your own return. A notebook doesn't judge the timeline. It just holds it.

The body keeps the score, as they say. But so does the notebook. And unlike the body, the notebook lets you read it back — lets you mark the distance between who you were and who you are now. That distance, I've found, is one of the most useful things a writer can measure.

January 28, 2026

On Writing Through the Fog

Some days the words come easily. Other days, the blank page feels like a verdict. I've learned that both of these days matter — and that showing up anyway is a kind of radical act.

The fog is not a sign that you have nothing to say. It's usually a sign that you're circling something true, something that hasn't found its shape yet. I stay. I write badly. I write slowly. And then, sometimes, something surfaces.

That's the deal with fog: you don't see through it. You walk through it.

January 14, 2026

What Grief Taught Me About Sentences

[ Your post image ]

Good grief — and I mean that literally. When I lost my mother, I found myself writing in fragments. Short bursts. Half-finished thoughts. It took me two years to understand that those fragments were already the story.

Grief doesn't move in paragraphs. It moves in flashes. A smell, a phrase, a drawer you can't bring yourself to open. My sentences started to look like that too — and that felt right, eventually. Like the form was finally honest.

I don't think I write the same way as I did before. I think I write better. Not more skillfully — more truthfully. Loss will do that, if you let it.

December 30, 2025

Year-End: What I Kept, What I Let Go

Every December I sit with my notebooks from the year — all of them — and I read. It's one of the most useful, most brutal things I know how to do. Here is what I found this time.

I kept: the mornings I wrote before I was ready. The drafts I hated and rewrote three times. The essays that scared me to publish. The ones that got quiet, unexpected responses from strangers who needed them.

I let go of: the idea that writing should feel good when it's happening. The comparison. The silence I mistook for failure. The year that just ended taught me that the work and the wound are often the same thing — and that's not a problem to solve. It's the whole point.

HecaSferra