Yes, I know, it’s an over-melodramatic and clickbait-y title. But it is definitely true that writing about my experiences enabled me to process what I’d been through and allowed me to finally recover after years of struggling with depression, anxiety and insomnia.
How Writing Saved My Life
I wrote a blog post in 2022 called ‘How Writing Saved My Life’. In that post, I talk about how I worked with my therapist to use my passion for writing to not only make the notes I was making for my therapy sessions more interesting but to turn them into a therapy tool themselves.
“I would write every few days about whatever topic had been dominating my thoughts, interspersed with bits of advice from my sessions with Jo [my CBT therapist]. I would write structured essays on one particular thing that had been on my mind, as if I were writing a blog post that other people would read (even though I never planned to actually share them).”
“I wrote about various topics, including the job and the relationship, and by focusing on one thing at a time, I was able to break down my problems and begin to work through them. Plus, by writing it all down, I was able to get the thoughts out of my head and onto the page, which stopped me from obsessing over them quite so much.”
Becoming a Father
I’ve written about this in other places on this site, but I also wrote a blog series called ‘I Am Your Father’, chronicling my experience of becoming a dad for the first time during lockdown (though I didn’t know that the lockdown was going to happen when I started it!).
As you can imagine, it was a difficult time, but I firmly believe that writing about it helped me to process what I was going through, and helped me to reflect on it afterwards.
Telling Stories
It doesn’t have to be essays and blog posts either. In 2019, I wrote a short story called The Journey for a short-story competition by Mind. It was a fantastic tale inspired by mythology about a man battling literal demons, based on my experiences and on the work I’d been doing in therapy.
The story was shortlisted by Mind and you can read it on my website.
Final Thoughts
So, that’s how I was able to use writing as a therapeutic tool, to help me process and come to terms with everything that happened to me. It may not work for you, but it’s something to consider if you’ve got something going round and round in your mind and just want to be free of it.
