When the Edits Never End
Learning to Trust What You’ve Lived
I sat down to write Chapter 7 of Silent Tears — “Vigilance” — thinking I was prepared. The outline was solid. The story was clear in my head. But the more I wrote, the more I found myself rewriting. And then editing. And then re-editing what I’d just edited.
At some point, I realized I’d spent two hours on one paragraph.
Part of it was the weight of what I was trying to capture, those years when my family was learning, in real time, how to keep my brother safe. We didn’t have degrees in autism care, or fancy certifications. We had trial, error, fear, and love.
When Gregory started eloping, slipping out of the house without warning, drawn to places only he understood, we became a family on constant alert. We learned to read the creak of the front door like a fire alarm. We learned which shoes meant “he’s about to go” and which meant “we’re safe for now.” That was our version of vigilance.
But when I sat down to write about it, I froze.
There’s this strange tension that happens when you try to put lived experience on paper, especially when it sits next to professional “best practices.” On one hand, you want to honor the experts. The therapists, teachers, and behavioral specialists who taught us systems and language for what we’d already been doing instinctively. On the other hand, you know that some of those systems never worked for your brother.
And that’s where the writing started to stall.
Every time I tried to describe our trial-and-error approach, my inner editor started whispering: “That’s not technically how you’re supposed to handle elopement.”
Then the perfectionist in me chimed in: “You can’t say that, what if a professional reads this?”
So instead of writing, I polished sentences that didn’t need polishing. I rearranged words instead of emotions. I treated my lived truth like it needed permission to exist.
That’s what overediting can do, not just to your writing, but to your courage.
And yet, the longer I sat with it, the more I realized: this is what the chapter is really about. The vigilance wasn’t just about watching over Gregory, it was about learning to trust ourselves. To recognize that the love and attention we gave him was a form of expertise. It just didn’t come with a manual.
So now, as I try to finish this chapter, I’m asking myself a new question:
How do I honor what we learned, the messy, real, human parts, without filtering it to sound perfect?
Because perfection doesn’t save anyone. Vigilance does.
And maybe that’s true in writing too. Maybe the best thing I can do right now isn’t to edit the story into submission, but to let it breathe, raw edges and all.
To other writers reading this:
How do you push past the instinct to overedit?
How do you stop yourself from sanding down the truth just to make it read more smoothly?
I’d love to hear your process, because I know I’m not the only one who gets stuck between telling the truth and telling it beautifully.
Until Next Time,