Words Have Always Been My Drug of Choice

A love letter to the messy art of rewriting yourself

As a kid, I made little books and lived in my imagination, dreaming up the life I wanted. Words were where I first found power… the ability to create worlds, to reshape reality, and make something beautiful from nothing.

I’ve made my living with them ever since. Scripts, ads, stories that sell things, and stories that sell dreams. From the stage to Nordstrom’s corporate halls, from New York agencies to the raw landscapes of Iceland. I’ve always been chasing the same high: the moment words land and everything shifts.

But the real work? That’s always been the stories we tell ourselves.

Spirituality wasn’t something I found in a yoga studio. It was survival, learning to dig beneath the surface when the surface felt like quicksand. The spiritual and the creative were never separate for me. They were both about the same thing: finding truth in the mess, beauty in the breakdown, meaning in the chaos.

Over time, those worlds began to merge. Storytelling became a way to help others understand themselves to find clarity and direction through their own narrative. Because here’s what I discovered: you can see your life as a story that happens to you, or as a story you can edit.

I chose to edit.

That choice became EVOKE Your Story - a methodology I built because I got tired of watching brilliant people shrink themselves to fit other people’s small stories. It’s been both a blessing and a brutal teacher. Creating something from scratch invites you into the unknown, and I never knew how to appreciate uncertainty until I had no choice.

Now I live for the moments when I have no idea what comes next. It usually means something is expanding.

These days, I work with actors and people with drama degrees. You know, those of us who aren’t Anne Hathaway and are wondering what the hell to do with all this training in transformation. I understand that world: the rollercoaster, the rejection, the constant negotiation between who you are and who you’re asked to be.

Drama degrees teach you that identity is performance, and performance is power.

My grandfather built something from nothing in Iceland’s brutal, beautiful Westfjords. He moved to Reykjavík with just his mother and his stubborn belief that he deserved bigger. Contractor, real estate investor, cobbler - he made himself from scratch. I inherited his stubbornness, not his blueprint.

Most of this path has been about finding my own way. And yes, it’s taken time.

But here’s what I know now: you are the director of your life - not the audience, not the critics, not the passing opinions of strangers. The moment you step into that role, everything clarifies. The noise fades. The distractions lose their grip. What remains is the fierce, simple truth that this is your story.

You can spend your life auditioning for roles other people wrote, or you can grab the pen.

Xo

Anna Rósa