Can Writing Save Your Life?

Why do we write? Why are stories so important? As a student of C.S. Lewis says in the movie Shadowlands: we read to know we're not alone. So is it the same for writing?

I think so. That's why I believe that everyone has a story to tell. And that we write and tell stories to understand who we are, in both darkness and light.

Sometimes we tell the wrong stories about ourselves, and we need to shift our perspective and change them. We can get stuck on the story that we are unlovable and will always be alone, or we how about the story that we are a victim of circumstances and other people - know that one? Those stories don't serve us, and we need to find stories that do.

As a child, I wrote to explore and manage my darker feelings, and I am so grateful that I was encouraged to have that as an outlet. I don't know what I would have done without it. My journals were a receptacle for my negative emotions: depression, jealousy, self-hate, rage. Of course, I experienced the lighter side of life as well, but I didn't need to write about that. In college I wrote avant-garde labyrynthine short stories - explorations of psychological trauma. After college, in my "acting" days, I wrote my own pieces to perform.

Sobriety at the age of 25 brought me to a new kind of hopeful writing. Writing was the only way that I knew how to "pray", to ask for help. Writing was my own version of getting on my knees. (I grew up in the church and had to change my perspective about what humility really meant.)

At that time I was also in graduate school, earning my Masters Degree in Drama Therapy. For my thesis I wrote a performance art piece entitled: Pandora's Hot Box - Lost in a Spiritual Supermarket. (Yes, inspired by The Clash.) Writing was therapy then, and continues to be so.

Even though the publishing business can bring up all of my neuroses, it is the process of writing on a daily basis that keeps saving my life.

Writing Edges was partly a way for me to come back to an understanding and gratitude for my own sobriety. It would be a lie to say that it wasn't part of my personal journey - yet it is fiction. And so it is true.

And the fiction I'm writing now is letting me explore, through my main character, the feeling of being in someone else's shadow and finding yourself despite that.

What about you? Where are you in your writing? Does the process help keep you sane as well?

Warmly,

Léna   xoxo