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This is adapted from an article that appeared on the Write Anything website on March 09, 2008. The original text can be found here.

Therapy

Some people drink to forget theirs. Others exercise to defeat theirs. Some will meditate to transcend theirs. And some people even talk about them, in order to overcome and resolve theirs.

We all have stresses, worries and issues in life. It seems that as the pace of life increases, so too do the challenges and problems that assault us. Problems that we need to work through, worries that we need to address. I exercise, I talk, but increasingly I have begun to write about my problems. Or rather, write as a way to work through them.

It is now one year since I decided that I wanted to be a writer. I can remember very clearly sitting at my desk in the office, staring at the computer screen, revising for the fourth or fifth time a report on an unimportant subject that would never be put into action (and to this day still hasn’t!). I remember the depressing realisation that my “temporary” job, rather than being a means to support me during my studies, had become a career path with a very limited destination. My academic ambitions in the meantime where going nowhere. I did not want this life. I no longer wanted what I though I had wanted. And I didn’t quite know what I wanted instead.

Apart from the writing. That was always there. So why not do that? A big career change, certainly - it would involve turning my back on everything I had built my life toward up to that moment, all the expectations of friends and family, and for what? An uncertain career with a high rate of failure. Was I mad?

No, but I wasn’t happy. And I wasn’t going to get any happier continuing as I had done before.

And that came out in a lot of the fiction I wrote in the aftermath of coming to that decision. Placing characters in similar situations to myself, or creating allegories of what I was going through, and then allowing the characters to control the story helped me work through my own doubts, fears and worries, and to realise some truths about myself. Early pieces all concerned paths and decisions, and choices that the protagonist had to make, often whilst being unaware of what the decisions entailed.

Now, when I have a problem or issue in my life, I find that thematically similar situations creep into my writing, sometimes subconsciously, sometimes deliberately. I work the problem out on paper to help me steer a course through troubled waters.

This week has been a particularly bad week. If in the next few days I happen to write anything involving particularly cruel and vindictive calamities befalling lawyers, you’ll know that I’m just dealing with a few issues….

Do you find that your own writing helps you come to a deeper understanding of yourself?

Has your writing ever helped you to resolve a particularly difficult problem you faced in your life?