Writing as Therapy

Three years ago plus change, my mother died suddenly and unexpectedly. It was nobody’s fault – just one of those things that happens sometimes. The next year and a half, everything else went wrong, one thing after another – my sister, already ill with glandular fever, was diagnosed with ME, a chronic fatigue syndrome; both my sister and my father suffered from depression; our dog died; I failed my A-level exams and failed to get into university that year. It set off a long, hard slog to get back to where I wanted to be, and away from where I had been put by circumstance.

You know what? I’m a much better writer because of it.

Don’t get me wrong – I would hand it all back if it would take back what happened to us. But the sheer magnitude of it changed me, and I found that I had to write, was forced to write. All my emotion came out in my writing – angry, painful, sad stories. I wrote my first full-length novel by six months after she had died – that’s around 100,000 words – and kept going with other things, too, just writing and writing for hours on end. Sometimes I would sit at the computer and produce 7,000 words in a morning.

Writing can be fun. But it can also be therapy. It helped me to vent all the things that I was feeling in a safe way. Of course, the sheer quantity I was producing also gave me a lot of practice, and I put a lot of the improvement down to that, too.

Writing still helps me to understand and deal with emotions I’m not sure what to do with, by taking myself a step away from them and putting them onto someone else, someone whose actions and reactions I can observe and understand and use. It lets me go deeper. And, in a strange way, I’m grateful for that.

My writing slowly changed anger into grief, and grief into slow recovery. You can see it in the things I wrote, in the changes in tone and story between works. It is still changing me in subtle ways I expect even I can’t see.

If something has happened to you, and you’re not sure you can deal with it, write it out. Let somebody else deal with it. You’ll be surprised what you come up with.