From Misfit to Messenger: How Writing Transformed My Pain into Purpose
- Dec 1, 2025
- 3 min read
By Jacqueline "Jax" Crider
I’ve never been much of a rule-follower. Even as a kid, I was the one getting in trouble—not for talking too much, but for reading when the teacher was teaching. My nose was buried in a book under the desk while math equations floated right past me. To some, that looked like defiance. To me, it was survival.
I wasn’t the kid who fit neatly into any box. While other kids were trading secrets on the playground, I was trading chapters with authors who felt like they knew me better than anyone around me. Books were my escape. They were lifelines, giving me worlds where the underdog was the hero and where curiosity wasn’t punished but celebrated. When you don’t quite feel like you belong, those pages become home. They whisper: you are not alone.
That’s the beauty of reading—you escape the noise of the world telling you who to be, but you also discover who you already are.
But reading was only the beginning. Books saved me, but writing transformed me.
At some point, I realized the words that had been healing me could also flow from me. I didn’t just want to consume stories; I needed to create them. Writing became the outlet that changed everything. It gave me a place to unload the weight I carried—the frustration of not fitting in, the sting of personal loss, the relentless drive to prove I could do life differently.
When life knocked me down—whether it was the 47 days we spent in the NICU with my daughter, seasons of financial strain, or the upheaval of pivoting businesses in a volatile market—writing gave me a way to process it all. Instead of stuffing the pain down, I put it on paper. And when you give pain a voice, it transforms. It turns from an invisible shadow into something you can look at, learn from, and eventually rise above.
That’s why I often say my writing is the bridge between my pain and my purpose.
Somewhere along the way, writing stopped being just for me. It became my way of leading. The more I wrote, the more I realized writing isn’t just healing—it’s leadership.
Because leadership doesn’t always come from the loudest voice in the room; it can come from the clearest story. Every book, podcast episode, and article I’ve written carries the thread of my story—but not the shiny, perfect version, the real one. The messy, gritty version where I fail, get back up, and choose to keep going. When I share how I’ve turned my setbacks into steppingstones, it gives others permission to do the same. That’s leadership on a soul level.
This is how I take complex financial ideas and make them peanut-butter-and-jelly simple in my book Mortgage 101: The Secret Sauce to Homebuying. It’s why I contributed to anthologies like Rise of the Phoenix—to show how you can rise from ashes, not despite your pain, but because of it. It’s how I remind women that financial success isn’t about fitting into someone else’s rules but about writing their own.
So why does this matter to you? Because I believe everyone has a story—and your story could be someone else’s survival guide, a way to transform their lives.
Maybe you’ve never thought of yourself as a "writer." Maybe the idea of putting your story out there terrifies you. I get it. But you don’t have to be an “author” to put words to paper. You just have to be willing to let them out.
Books were once my secret friends. Now, writing is my megaphone. It helped me heal from wounds I didn’t know I was carrying. It helped me grow into the leader I didn’t think I was qualified to be.
Here’s my invitation: Pick up the pen. Open the notebook. Start writing the story you’ve been too afraid to tell. You never know who needs to hear it—including yourself.
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