Welcome to the newest post in Writing While Healing, a series where I speak with indie authors who’ve found light through writing during their darkest times.
Today, I’m honored to feature Rose Rita James, an indie author. You can learn more about Rose Rita James here.
Please introduce yourself!
Rose Rita James, LCSW
Please tell us a little about yourself and the kind of stories you write.
I write literary nonfiction at the intersection of the body, psychology, spirituality, and the strange, beautiful work of being human. My first book, Tears Are Holy Water: Somatic Wisdom & Rituals for Feeling and Aliveness, weaves nervous system science, somatic psychology, ritual, personal reflection, and poetic inquiry into an exploration of what it means to inhabit ourselves more fully. I’m especially drawn to the places where our inner lives resist tidy categories: grief and joy, overwhelm and numbness, science and mystery, wounding and aliveness. Ultimately, I write about our capacity to feel, heal, create meaning, and remain alive to ourselves and the world around us.
Please share a bit about your mental health journey, as much as you are comfortable with :)
I wrote Tears Are Holy Water during a season when my own capacity was being asked to stretch in nearly every direction. I was navigating perimenopause, elder care, unexpected loss and grief, and the secondary trauma that can accompany working as a trauma therapist, while also mothering two teenagers and a young child.
So although I brought decades of professional study and clinical experience to the book, I was also living many of its questions in real time. How do we stay present to ourselves when life asks more of us than feels reasonable? How do we make room for grief, exhaustion, anger, joy, and beauty without being consumed by what we feel or disconnecting from it entirely?
Writing the book became part of how I metabolized that season. Many of the somatic practices, rituals, and ideas I was writing about were not abstract concepts to me. They were things I was actively leaning on to remain connected to myself, my family, my work, and my own aliveness while moving through a profoundly demanding chapter of life.
How has your mental health influenced your writing process or creativity?
My mental and emotional health are inseparable from my creative process because I experience creativity as an embodied act. I don’t believe we create only from the mind. We create through the whole nervous system, and my capacity to write changes depending on what my body and life are carrying.
That has taught me to work with myself rather than continually override myself. Sometimes that means writing from the raw material of grief, anger, wonder, or uncertainty. Sometimes it means walking until an idea finds me, following an image or sensation before I understand what it wants to become, or letting something remain unresolved on the page. And sometimes tending to my mental health means recognizing that I do not have the capacity to create at all and allowing rest to be part of the creative process.
Paradoxically, giving myself that permission has made me more creative, not less. The more deeply I listen to myself, the more interesting the work becomes.Do you find writing to be healing, challenging, or a bit of both?
Both, although I generally only write, paint, sculpt, or create adornment pieces when I feel the urge to. I’ve learned not to force creativity into productivity. Instead, I follow the urge when it arrives and allow myself to follow it deeply, sometimes almost obsessively, until it has moved through me.
Because of that, creating often feels less like something I decide to do and more like something asking to be made, that I am allowing. There can certainly be challenge in the process, but the act itself is usually deeply regulating and restorative for me. I trust the impulse, make room for it when it appears, and try not to interfere too much with where it wants to take me.
Sometimes a deadline is useful because it creates the urgency I need to finish something I’ve already begun organically. But at this stage in my life, I don’t rely on someone else’s request, assignment, or expectation for me to be creative. The impulse comes first. A deadline might help me bring it across the finish line, but it isn’t what calls the work into being.
Has your experience with mental health shaped the themes or characters in your stories?
Absolutely. I’m a trauma therapist as well as a writer, so questions of mental and emotional health are woven through nearly everything I create. Tears Are Holy Water is fundamentally interested in what happens when our feelings become too big to hold, or when we become so disconnected from them that we struggle to feel at all.
My own experiences have also made me much less interested in stories of healing that move neatly from wounded to healed. I’m interested in the messier, more human reality: that grief can coexist with joy, that someone can be struggling and deeply alive at the same time, and that healing doesn’t necessarily mean eliminating difficult emotions. Often, it means expanding our capacity to be with the fullness of our experience.
Because I write nonfiction, I don’t create characters in the traditional sense, but Tears Are Holy Water does include case studies. Those characters and circumstances are technically fictional, created to protect confidentiality, but they are amalgamations of people, patterns, struggles, and moments I’ve encountered across many years of clinical work. No single case study represents any one person. Instead, they allow me to tell something emotionally and clinically true about the human experiences I’ve had the privilege of witnessing.
That work has reinforced my belief that none of us can be reduced to our wounds, diagnoses, or hardest seasons.
Are there any writing routines, boundaries, or self-care habits that help you stay grounded?
For Tears Are Holy Water, one of the most grounding things I did was create an outline and actually stick with it. The subject matter is expansive, and I could have followed any number of fascinating threads indefinitely. The outline gave me a container. I could wander deeply within each section without losing the larger shape of what I was making.
Beyond structure, I try to work with my nervous system rather than against it. I take walks, step away when I notice myself forcing something, and let ideas develop away from the page. I also protect periods of rest and incubation. I’ve learned that staring harder at a sentence is not always the thing that makes it arrive.
I think of boundaries around creativity similarly to boundaries everywhere else in my life: they create enough safety and containment for something more spontaneous and alive to emerge.
What advice would you give to other writers who have similar struggles as you?
Pay attention to what is alive in you and what seems to be asking to come forward. Trust your urges. Follow them. Allow them. You don’t always have to understand why something wants to be written, painted, spoken, or made before you begin.
I think we can become so focused on being productive or disciplined that we stop listening for what actually wants to emerge. Sometimes creativity is the psyche’s way of processing something before our conscious mind has language for it. Let what wants to come forward, come forward. Give it somewhere to go.
And be gentle with the seasons when very little comes. Rest, grief, uncertainty, and simply living your life are not interruptions to creativity. They are part of the material from which creativity eventually emerges. Trust that process, too.
Have you ever taken breaks from writing to focus on your mental health?
Absolutely. I have taken long breaks from writing and other forms of creative work when my energy needed to go toward simply living, caregiving, grieving, or tending to myself and the people I love. I don’t experience those periods as failures of creativity anymore.
I often share a framework with my clients that creativity needs seasonal periods of Fecundity, Fertility, Feast, and Fallow. Like the land, we cannot be perpetually producing. We need periods of composting and rest in order to bring forth our best bounty. Sometimes we are full of possibility and ideas, sometimes actively growing and making, sometimes enjoying what we have brought into being, and sometimes the field needs to lie fallow.
I’ve learned not to demand that something bloom simply because I would prefer it to be spring. A fallow period is not an absence of creativity. There is often tremendous activity happening beneath the surface, transforming what we have lived into whatever might eventually emerge.
When the urge to create returns, I trust that too. I make room for it and follow where it wants to go.
What’s something you wish more people understood about being a writer with mental health struggles?
I wish more people understood that suffering is not what makes someone creative. We have deeply romanticized the idea of the tortured artist, as though pain is the price of admission for making meaningful work. I don’t believe that.
I think what often feeds both creativity and struggle is sensitivity: our capacity to notice, feel, perceive, and be affected by the world. The creative gift is not the suffering itself, but our sensitivity and the relationship we develop with it. Our struggles certainly become part of the material of our lives, and creativity can give us somewhere to metabolize and transform that material, but we do not need to remain unwell in order to remain interesting or creative.
In fact, the more capacity I have to be present with my own sensitivity, the more access I have to curiosity, play, pleasure, complexity, and wonder. Mental health struggles may shape the terrain an artist travels, but they do not have to be the engine driving the journey.
Healing does not make us less creative. It gives us more of ourselves to create with.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with the readers?
I think I would simply offer this: your sensitivity is not something you need to conquer in order to make a life or make meaningful work. Learn its language. Become curious about what moves you, what overwhelms you, what delights you, and what makes something inside you lean forward and say, THAT.
We spend so much time being taught how to override ourselves. Creativity can be one of the places where we practice remembering how to listen.
Notice what is alive in you. Follow what wants to come forward. Give yourself seasons of making and seasons of composting. Let yourself be changed by what you create.
Our sensitivity is not only where we encounter the ache of being alive. It is also how we experience its beauty.
Where can readers connect with you and your work? (Socials, website, books, etc.)
Instagram/Threads/Tiktok/Facebook - @roseritajames
Website____________________________________________________________
Thank you for reading!
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