Still Learning To Write Like Me

By Kristi Cruise

People assume writing comes easy for me. After all, I’ve been a journalist, a health reporter, an author for nearly 30 years. (Wow, that's a long time.)  My days of pretending to be older than I am to be taken seriously have long since passed. And my writing has changes so much over time. I’ve written thousands of stories in my life—but most of them weren’t mine. That was the job. You learned to strip yourself out of it. You knew that the story was never about you. You didn’t cry on the copy. You didn’t let your voice shake. (Expect that one time when I was coming the house fire that swallowed 2 firefighters. they were moving across the living room floor, the fire was in the basement and when the crossed the unknown inferno, it swallowed them whole. That the only time I remember in my TV career where I had a difficult time keeping it together.) 

But those days of writing hard news. They are long gone. And now? Now, almost everything I write is me.

It’s weird, being trained to disappear—and then suddenly being asked to show up fully. My writing today is part storytelling, part soul-bearing, part creative memoir. It’s personal. It’s public. It’s vulnerable. And I’ll be honest: I’m still learning how to do it.

I’m still learning to trust my voice.
To let the raw parts through.
To stop editing myself into something will be more pleasing.



What’s wild is—when I teach yoga at Life Time, I don’t struggle with that. That’s the one space where I fully surrender. I stop thinking entirely. A huge part of my brain shuts off and enters this intuitive space where movement and words just flow. I speak what I feel. I read the room. I let the poses dance with the breath. And I know when it’s working—not because of praise, but because of energy. The class flies by. People leave not just stretched, but restored. It’s therapy, not choreography. And it works because I get out of my own way.

That’s the exact space I’m trying to write from now.

Kristi Cruise with Serious Yoga Face
Kristi Cruise Yoga, Life Time, Charlotte


The deep, wordless, knowing place.
The place that heals me, too. The place where the universe can come through me and connect with anyone who wants to hear and feel my words. 

Some days I nail it. Some days I just write. But every time I show up, honestly—whether it’s on the mat or on the page.

Here’s to writing like we breathe.
Weird, wild, a bit clunky and perfectly imperfect. 

Here's to getting out of our own way. 

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