Writing as Therapy I: Secret Words

I have been thinking about writing as therapy ever since I was asked to speak on it last week. I barely scratched the surface on how beneficial the written word is to us as a tool for healing and figuring things out.

I often say I think with my fingers. I often don’t know exactly what I feel until my fingers touch a keyboard, or, in desperate times, a pen and any surface I can write on.

That’s true for many of us. Touching the keyboard is similar to putting hands on a planchette—like on the Ouija board, messages from beyond spread across the page. The spirits we communicate with is our own, often struck dumb by the world around us. Grateful for a voice, once it speaks, it speaks volumes.

One of the reasons I think we can so freely express ourselves through writing is because it enables us to lose control while retaining privacy. Not all writing is destined to be published on Amazon. Some of our words are just for us—we just want to voice the dark events we live through. The words are proof we exist, a mark of our survival. The writing proves we are still here—sometimes we are still here because of the writing.

One of my early short stories started out as a suicide note. Some terrible things had just happened to me and I found my mundane, comfortable world was blown apart. Not only had the recent catastrophic events damaged me, but they opened deep wounds from childhood that I thought I had buried. I decided it was time to go.

My fingers touched the keyboard to tap out my final message. My plan was to tie a cinder block around my ankle and kick it over a nearby bridge with me following. As I tapped out my intentions, ways that I could possibly mess this up started spilling across the page. Probably the rope will be a little too long, I thought, and I will be stuck bobbing helplessly on the surface until someone rescues me.

The thought struck me as funny, and I wound up writing out the scenario of how I would botch my own death. The act of written role play diffused my negative spin and I started writing my way out of the pit I had descended in. That suicide note became the short story When I Committed Suicide that appears in Mr. BoneJangles, a collection of my short stories published by Line by Lion.

I could write openly about what I felt because it was private. I couldn’t tell anyone I knew what I was going through, but paper keeps secrets. I knew what I wrote was just for me, and it was the beginning of me learning to be honest with myself. It bought me time. The words I wrote kept me tethered to this world long enough for me to learn to deal with it again.