Craft of Writing: Writing through Pain.

Dear Reader,

I'm struggling right now to keep moving forward. I am well and truly depressed right now. Seasonal Affective Disorder and Bipolar have teamed up to do a number on me. Writing as therapy is a fairly well recognized practice. There are tons of therapy writing prompts out there. In the end, no number of prompts are going to help you if you are not willing to put something painful down on the page.

I've been in some form of therapy most of my adult life. I was introduced to journal writing as a therapeutic tool back with my first therapist in college. It was hard at first. It was painful and distressing to write down the ugly things that were in my heart and head. I was half tempted to give up on it right at the beginning because I didn't want to read these things to my therapist.

I mentioned this concern to my therapist and I was told something absolutely liberating. I didn't have to share anything in my therapy journal with them. I didn't have to discuss or show what I had written. The journal was just for me to write about what I was struggling with and how I was coping. It completely changed how I approached therapy writing. Instead of viewing it as an assignment to complete and turn in, it became a space where I explored my Post-traumatic stress disorder and all of its permutations in my life at that time. It became a space where I addressed my chronic nightmares and attempted to make sense of the insanity of my life at that time. The stress of college on top of the stress of coming from a traumatic history made things very difficult. My therapy journal writing became my lifeline to sanity through those challenges.

My morning pages look more like that old therapy journal work than the short stories I used to write in my writing journal. That is alright, though, because there is no wrong way to do morning pages or therapy journal work. The fact that I am writing the pain down and processing it is what matters. Between my knitting for charity, my crochet for charity, and my morning pages, I'm beginning to make progress on getting to the other side of this depressive episode.

Perhaps some day soon, I'll get back to writing prose that is more fanciful and artistic. Right now, I am just shoveling manure from a sitting position. And that's ok as long as I keep writing.