Writing
For more than four decades, I have kept journals. What began as a child's attempt to understand the world became a lifelong practice of observation, survival, and self-discovery. These reflections explore creativity, mental health, recovery, resilience, relationships, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
Featured Writing:
I Had Therapy Today
Thirty years. Thousands of therapy sessions. Countless attempts to understand the ways trauma, depression, addiction, and survival shape a life.
In this deeply personal essay published in Women Write, Erin McGrath Rieke reflects on the lasting impact of sexual violence, the complexity of recovery, and the lifelong work of learning how to remain present inside one's own story.
Published in Women Write
The Mother
This essay explores memory, family, silence, and the complicated realities of loving someone who is struggling with their own unseen battles. Through the lens of childhood observation and adult reflection, The Mother examines how children learn to navigate emotional uncertainty, how families adapt to what remains unspoken, and how understanding often arrives decades after the events themselves.
Published in Medium
Browse by Collection:
Daily Meditations
365 reflections and writing prompts exploring growth, awareness, resilience, and creativity.
Essays & Reflections
Personal essays, observations, memoir fragments, and long-form writing.
White Blank Page
Poetry, fragments, unfinished thoughts, and language that arrives before explanation.
The I AM Archive
An ongoing exploration of identity through journals, photographs, artwork, and memory.
The evidence is scattered across stacks of my journals and notes scribbled in the margins of books. For years, I’ve been searching for understanding: of memory, identity, grief, creativity, recovery, and the ways we hold each other up and keep going, even when life throws us experiences that nearly break us. My hope is to honor the tenderness and resilience that live in each of us.
The reflections I’m working to gather here are fragments of that ongoing conversation with myself, with others, and with the world. Some are intimate glimpses into my own life, vulnerable moments I hope will help someone feel less alone. Others are shaped by research, history, psychology, and what I’ve observed around me. Each page is an offering, a gentle invitation to see our shared humanity with a little more compassion and love.
What truly matters to me is paying attention to the tiny details, the shifting emotions, and the stories we carry with us, and showing up for each other with patience, empathy, and tenderness.