I’m lucky enough to get to work with Senator Lynn Ruane regularly through her column for rogue, and she is one of the most emotionally intelligent people I’ve ever met. We talked about the experience of writing her 2018 memoir People Like Me, about revisiting traumatic experiences, and learning how to protect yourself in the present when revisiting the past, about the responsibility that comes with writing about other, especially your children, and also when you are writing about experiences of your own that then can become a voice for your community, about switching off from the comments section, getting into a flow state when writing and how that helps with not self editing in the first draft, and how writing can help you process anger but then learning to leave that anger there on the page and move on.