Why I Started Don’t Rush the Bacon

People keep asking me two questions.

Why a blog?

And why… bacon?

Fair. Let me take the bacon one first, because it’s my favorite.

There was no mountaintop moment. No vision board. No branding consultant.

I was standing in my kitchen cooking bacon. That’s it. That’s the whole origin story. Somewhere between the sizzle and the grease pops, the name just landed on me, because I realized I’d been rushing everything. Rushing work. Rushing meals. Rushing conversations. Rushing whole seasons of my own life without ever actually being in them.

And in three months, I turn forty.

Forty.

I don’t know how that happened. I was twenty-five, I blinked, and now I’m googling whether my knee sound is normal.

Standing over that pan, it hit me that I had sprinted through almost four decades. And the thing about sprinting is that the scenery blurs. I didn’t want the next forty to blur.

“Don’t rush the bacon.”

So that answers the bacon.

Now the harder question. Why write?

Here’s the part where I come clean about something: I’m a doctor. A psychologist, to be exact. I’ve spent my career sitting across from other people while they told me their stories. The wins, the losses, the grief, the things they’d never said out loud to anyone.

And in all those years, I never really told mine.

But here’s what my own field taught me, and it’s the real reason this blog exists.

Psychologists have been studying what happens when people write about their lives for about forty years. Back in the 1980s, a researcher named James Pennebaker started asking people to write about their deepest thoughts and feelings around difficult experiences. Just fifteen to twenty minutes a day, for a few days in a row. Hundreds of studies later, that simple practice, called expressive writing, has been linked to better mood, less rumination, and in some studies even fewer trips to the doctor.

It goes further than journaling for the vibes. There is an entire trauma treatment built on writing. It’s called Written Exposure Therapy, a brief five-session protocol developed by psychologists Denise Sloan and Brian Marx. In clinical trials it has held its own against much longer gold-standard PTSD treatments, and fewer people drop out of it. Writing, structured the right way, is genuinely powerful medicine.

Why does it work?

Because thoughts and feelings in your head move fast. They swirl, they loop, they tangle around each other at 2 a.m. But writing forces everything to slow down to the speed of language.

To put an experience into words, your brain has to give it a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has to name the feelings, and research on what scientists call affect labeling shows that simply naming an emotion helps turn down the brain’s alarm response. It has to take the scattered pieces and organize them into an actual story.

And once it’s a story, something changes.

You can finally see the patterns. The schemas, as we call them in my world. The old beliefs running quietly in the background: I have to earn rest. I can’t slow down or everything falls apart. If I’m not achieving, who am I?

You can’t change a pattern you can’t see.

Writing lets you see it.

So this blog is me taking my own medicine.

Don’t Rush the Bacon is a personal journey blog. The wins and the fails. The losses and the grief. The happiness, the trauma, the sadness, the random 2 a.m. thoughts, all of it, written down slowly instead of rushed past.

It’s for anyone who needs a good read into someone else’s life and wants to feel a little less alone in their own.

And it’s to show you something I wish more people knew:

Even doctors are human.

We grieve. We fail. We burn dinner. We sit in our cars in the driveway for five extra minutes. We rush our own bacon while telling everyone else to slow down.

I’m done rushing mine.

Pull up a chair. Let’s let this cook. 🥓