Writing becomes a form of survival, turning scattered experiences into meaning, and giving firefighters a way to understand themselves
Over the last little while, more people have been reaching out asking about writing for CRACKYL. They want to know whether they can contribute, what we’re actually looking for, and whether their experience is even worth sharing.
The more I answer those questions, the more I keep coming back to what writing has actually done for me.
I have always written. Articles, books, speeches, Friday Truths, and notes that may never become anything. I never stepped back and considered where writing fit into the larger picture of my mental health. I knew I enjoyed it. I knew it helped me organize ideas. I’m beginning to realize it’s also been how I digest my own life while I’m still living it.
Writer and journalist Joan Didion once wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.” That may be the best explanation I’ve heard.
Writing Reveals Us
Most days, I don’t know what I actually think until I start putting words on paper. I’ll start with something from work, a conversation, a loss, a mistake, or something happening at home. Somewhere between the first sentence and the last, I figure out what’s really going on in my head and what it means to me.
There’s research behind this, too. Expressive writing has been studied for decades — hundreds of studies looking at its effects on psychological and physical health. The findings aren’t identical for everyone, and writing isn’t a replacement for professional support, but the process can help people organize stressful experiences and put language to thoughts that have been hard to process.
James Pennebaker, the psychologist who pioneered most of this research, found something specific in his work with people processing trauma: writing about it for as little as 15 minutes a day, a few days in a row, was enough to change how their bodies and minds responded to it. People who wrote honestly about difficult experiences ended up with fewer doctor visits and measurable improvements in physical health compared to people who wrote about neutral topics instead. The benefit wasn’t really about the writing itself. It came from what writing forced people to do — take something scattered and disorganized and turn it into a story with a beginning, a middle and some kind of understanding by the end.
For years, I’ve believed we need a much wider window into the mental health of firefighters and first responders. I’m not knocking therapy or peer support — they matter, and so do the conversations we have within our own crews. But when our most honest thoughts stay locked inside a therapist’s office or inside the same small circle, the rest of us never get to learn from them. Every firefighter holds a different piece of the picture — built from what they’ve lived through, what they’ve learned, and how many years they’ve already put on the job.
More Voices Mean More Truth
We’ve listened to different podcasts, read different books, worked different calls, and lived through different seasons of our own lives. Some of us have lived through trauma. Others understand leadership, marriage, parenting, addiction, fitness, financial stress, retirement, or rebuilding after life has gone sideways. When those experiences get shared, we start building a larger body of understanding instead of trying to explain the mental health of an entire profession through a handful of voices.
The fire service has made real progress on mental health over the past 15 years, but this profession is still learning how cumulative exposure works on a person across all the years they serve. One bad call can change someone, no question. For most of us, though, it’s the accumulation — the calls, the missed sleep, the responsibility, the losses, the frustrations — everything that stacks up over time.
No single person can explain all of that. Maybe that’s the real value in more firefighters writing and sharing what they know — it gives us more experience to draw from, and a better shot at understanding what actually happens to people over the years they serve.
I sometimes think about actors whose careers span several decades. You can watch them age on screen — the faces change, the roles change, the performances start showing an experience they couldn’t have brought to the work when they were younger.
Writing Tracks Our Evolution
Writing lets me see something similar in myself. I can go back and read something I wrote years ago and recognize exactly who I was at that point in my life — what mattered to me, what I was struggling to understand, where I was probably getting in my own way. Then I can set it next to how I write and think today.
It becomes a record of evolution that memory alone can’t give me.
I also wonder if the real value is in the consistency. One article captures a moment, but a collection written over years reveals a pattern — where the thinking changed, where a lesson finally sank in, where the same unresolved issue kept showing up in a different form.
Maybe writing is less about producing something impressive and more about leaving a record of what I was thinking, what I was learning, and who I was becoming at different points in my life.
A Mirror of Sorts
If you haven’t put any of this into words yourself, consider this your nudge. You don’t have to publish it. You don’t have to show it to a single person. Just write it down and see what shows up on the page. It might turn out to be the “write way” through it for you, too.
The truth is, writing gives us something memory cannot — a record of who we were before we became who we are. Every time we put something honest on the page, we leave behind a marker of where we were at that point in our lives. We may not recognize our own growth while it’s happening, but we can see it when we come face to face with an earlier version of ourselves.
