Tag: words

The Subtle Power of Sharing Words Online by Jessica Mary Ellis

My digital life began years ago at a cramped dressing table in London. My flatmate wandered into my bedroom, with a simple question: “Have you heard of Facebook?” Looking back, it’s hard to believe how innocent it all was. We spent our days navigating a strange new world that forced us to speak about ourselves in the third person. Our profiles became a running list of mundane fragments: …is drinking coffee, excited about going out later, feeling Monday-ish, on the tube.

Little did we know that we had just stepped into a time where everyone, everywhere, could suddenly write and share whatever they liked. For the next decade, my life was curated in a digital archive of London. I posted photographs to broadcast my happiness, masking the fact that, beneath the surface, I was often incredibly lonely. My feed became a beautiful illusion of endless dinners, tourist hot spots, sunlit rooftops, and spontaneous weekends away.

Then, as the years quietly shifted and life moved on, my feed changed and was replaced by the arrival of wedding pictures and baby pictures. I suppose, like most of us, I was using the internet to tell the story of my life and what was happening in it.

The immediate freedom to write anything we like, exactly when the mood strikes.

Then came the era of mum bloggers. Out of nowhere, mums started using Facebook as a place to share the honest parts of being mothers to small children. The parts that didn’t make it into the baby books like the loneliness that could somehow exist alongside never being alone.

In a way, these Facebook blog posts were the first time I had ever read something outside of a physical book that I truly related to. As a mother of two small children, living far from my family and having recently left London life behind, I was lonelier than ever. So, I decided to start writing too.

A few follows later, I found myself surrounded by a digital network of mums who truly understood. Women I had never even met knew precisely what I meant when I said I was tired. I did not mean tired in the way we used to be, but in that slightly delirious exhaustion that only comes with motherhood. The wonderful thing about the accessibility of social media and digital is that these women were there, online, every day.

And suddenly, I didn’t feel quite so alone. That’s when I started writing and building a community online.

We were all so beautifully, fiercely fearless back then. We wrote with our whole hearts, typed through sleepless eyes, and tapped out updates with fingers still covered in nappy cream. There was no spending hours wondering whether a thought or a phrase was polished enough to share with the world. We didn’t care about formatting, aesthetics, or the algorithm.

I am just a human who loves to write.

We simply wrote what we wanted to write, exactly as it tumbled out of us. I find myself needing to return to that often now. Sometimes, that early digital bravery gives way to second-guessing. I can overthink every sentence, over-analyse every idea, until I ultimately end up blocking my own creative voice which is the worst kind of self-sabotage when you are trying to breathe life into a poem or finally finish a manuscript.

I’m not a content creator, and I never wanted to be; I am just a human who loves to write. While the wonderful world of traditional publishing offers the beautiful professionalism of editors, deadlines, and polished revisions, this digital landscape always did and still does provide us with a completely different kind of outlet.

It grants us a rare luxury: the immediate freedom to write anything we like, exactly when the mood strikes. There is something so special and unique about sitting entirely alone in a room, fumbling around in your mind until you find the perfect combination of words for a fleeting feeling, and simply hitting publish.

This digital space has done something. It opened the floodgates, handed millions of ordinary people a completely blank canvas, and whispered: Go on then. Tell us. And we did. In many ways, my own winding path toward finding my voice and learning exactly what blocks it became the very heart of my debut children’s verse novel. Not only because the young protagonist undergoes that exact same journey of self-discovery within the pages, but because the structure itself demanded a leap of faith.

Choosing to write an entire book in verse felt risky; it felt less obvious, less mainstream. But it brought me right back to that tiny, essential seed of courage we all started with online all those years ago: the simple, radical belief that you are allowed to write in a way that feels true to you and be yourself.

When the Birds Wake Up

Follows Pear, a ten-year-old who is struggling with many things. With her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s, and starting at a new school with new people.

That is, until she meets Piglet, the ragged rescue dog who helps Pear remember what is most important in life. Through a journey of love, friendship and music, Piglet helps Pear to look at the world differently.

Jessica Mary Ellis

Jessica Mary Ellis believes in words that land quietly but stay with you long after. She writes poetry for adults and verse stories for children, always searching for the small truths tucked inside everyday life.

She hopes handwritten letters will make a comeback, because nothing feels lovelier than a letter arriving through the letterbox from someone who was thinking of you. Her poems, shared on Instagram (@jessica_mary_ellis), have been read around the world.

Jessica lives in Kent with her husband Jeff, her two children, Amelie and Jack, and their dog Teddy. When the Birds Wake Up is her debut novel.