With a major shift in our politics underway in this country, 1A is drilling down on what's at stake for you and our democracy.

In our weekly series, If You Can Keep It, we put these changes into focus and answer your questions about the impact of the Trump administration on the U.S.

Join us every Monday for If You Can Keep It on the 1A podcast from NPR and WAMU.

You're listening to LifeKit from NPR.

Hey, it's Mariel.

If I were to make a list of the things that scare a lot of people,

a greatest hits list for

our collective fears, here's what would be on it. Death, rejection, public speaking, spiders,

showing up on the day of the midterm two hours late and without a pencil, and the blank page.

Yeah, I would put writers block on that list of big scaries.

So many of us are afraid to start writing because we judge ourselves, because we've been told

we're no good at it, because we don't know what to say.

But writer Sulayka Joad is here to tell you it's worth your time to try.

I've been keeping a journal for as long as I could hold a pen and have hundreds of

journals from the time I was a kid.

And I think from a really early age, the journal to me felt like a sacred space and a rarer space where I got to show up as my most unedited, unvarnished self.

And it wasn't for anyone.

It was just for me.

It became an especially sacred space when Zuleka was diagnosed with leukemia,

and in the moment since, that she's been in cancer treatment or coping with its effects.

She says there's something about journaling that allows for a transmutation, sort of alchemy.

Which is to say by the end of writing my way through a journal, I felt that some small shift had been enacted.

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