Writing as Self Care – WN 003

This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 3: Writing As Self-Care.

[Intro music.]

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion, and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner. And I run this podcast, I guess. I also run a writer’s group for young career-oriented women downtown, and they come for all sorts of reasons.

Some of them are just looking for a creative outlet or for brushing up skills at their current job if they do a lot of writing there, or even for things like content marketing, which I do a fair bit of in my own job, or writing for the web, which I also do a fair amount of. If I haven’t shared this with you before, I’m a content strategist, which means I work a lot with web content essentially. I won’t go into it here because you are not here to hear about my job.

So these young women come for their various reasons and during one of our sessions early on, I asked the question, “Why do we write? What drives us to write?” And it’s kind of the opposite of what I asked in my first podcast episode for you. And the question there was, “What keeps us from writing?” But the question I wanted these young women to answer was why do we write? And I got a lot of really, really good and different and interesting answers. And I was so pleased to see such a diverse number of reasons for writing.

Some of them wrote for creative release. Some of them wrote to share ideas or spread a message. Some of them wrote because it was fun. Some of them wrote because they wanted to make money, which is a totally legitimate reason for writing. When it came my turn to share, I said that I wrote because I felt compelled to write. And between you and me, I am still unpacking what that means. If you would’ve asked me two years ago, I would have said something completely different. And if you ask me two years from now, I will probably say something completely different, because of course you are going to call me in two years and asked me why I’m writing, probably.

So I got all of these really interesting and cool and different and varied answers from some very smart, intelligent, dedicated, ambitious young women. And then one of the women shared a reason for writing that I had never heard of before. I won’t share her name to protect her privacy, but I won’t ever forget what she said. She talked about writing as self-care, and it was a phrase I’d never heard before, and I’m not entirely certain it’s mainstream. You’ll see a lot of people talking about writing as therapeutic, writing as cathartic, writing as healing, but I’ve never actually heard of it spoken of as self-care.

Now, this young woman, and I feel dumb calling her a young woman because I’m a young woman, and that makes me feel like an old lady. So I will call her my dear friend. My dear friend has been through a lot. And I think a lot of us have. One of the reasons that we write is to process some of the experiences we’ve had, or to deal with past issues, or to even simply record our own history in a way that makes sense to us. And it doesn’t matter what genre you’re writing in. Some people express themselves best through poetry, some people do journal, others write newspaper articles and make a living off of their craft.

But no matter what kind of writing you’re doing, I want to explore the idea of writing as self-care. And what I think is really most interesting here is that the term self-care implies not necessarily treatment, but a sort of ongoing maintenance, as though it were necessary for us to write every day, just like it is necessary for me to brush my teeth every morning and every evening so I don’t look like a scary monster. But writing is necessary to our daily health.

But before I get into that, I want to talk about writing as self-care in sort of three separate categories. And I’m not going to say that any one of these is at all any better or any worse than the others. All three of these kinds of writing have their purpose and I have used them all.

The first one, I want to talk about his writing as treatment. I know a lot of people who are really into creative nonfiction. The genre has kind of come into its own over the past decade or so, but a lot of people are very, very dedicated to this craft, and they express themselves via blogging, via essays, short anecdotes, sometimes longer form, books and memoirs. But as I mentioned earlier, some of this writing is almost a sort of treatment, a sort of healing. I know that there’s the idea of the talking cure. And I think that that was Freud, but there’s this idea of external processing. And I do it myself a lot. If you work with me, you know that I pretty much could spend my whole day talking. That’s why doing a podcast sounded like a really fun idea to me, but there’s this persistent idea of writing is healing, and processing is healthy, and getting the words out is productive.

I know when I took a creative nonfiction class in college, most of the pieces I wrote, both short and long form, ended up being about some traumatic experiences that I had gone through. I wrote one, for instance, about the summer I turned 16 and spent my 16th birthday in the hospital having my spine fused, you know, like any normal 16 year old girl. I had scoliosis and it was bad. The base of my spine had turned all the way around, my back was curved at a 68 degree angle, my spine was growing into my heart and lungs. And if it continued in that fashion, my heart and lungs would stop working properly. So they decided it would probably be in my best interest to fix that.

But as a 16- year-old girl, and no offense to any listeners who are in that age range, I’ve come a long way since then. Not only in terms of wisdom or intelligence, but in the way I process information, in the context in which I process information. And so by doing some creative nonfiction writing about this experience, and by relating it to a similar experience that summer where a large migrating number of praying mantises, for whatever reason, attached themselves to the white siding of our house in Cleveland, Ohio, that provided new meaning to me, and at the level at where I was, a new understanding of what that whole experience had meant to me and my, oh, I don’t want to say unformed mind, but my mind as it was when I was a very foolish 16-year-old girl.

And I like that we can do that. I know that sometimes by writing down things that have happened to us, we can not only process them better, but we can put order to them, we can put a timeline to events that seem distorted chronologically, we can add years of experienced opinion to it. We can add insight, wisdom. We can find parallels and symbolism. We can pull out meaning from something that at the time felt meaningless. But we can also chronicle it, and I think this is important, because I have a terrible memory. I really do. I’m so sorry if any of this podcast seems meandering or strange, but very rarely can I remember anything that I have said. But sometimes even recording our history, our own history, through whatever lens it ends up being recorded through, can have a great value. Sometimes it’s a really great way to not only remember where you’ve been, but why you’ve become who you have become.

I’m going to bring up journaling because this is one of the obvious forms of writing as healing. I received my first diary when I was in third grade and I remember it because it was super cool. It had this combination lock on it and I could make it spell whatever I wanted, and nobody else knew the combination, as far as I know. And I wrote down in a very dutiful but silly fashion every single thing that happened to me in third grade, and then fourth grade, and fifth grade and so on. The diaries changed as I ran out of room, as my penmanship became sloppier and sloppier, and more spread out.

But I went back and re-visited those. And as I was reading through the childish rant about an injustice that had transpired on the bus on my way home from school, I felt this odd sense of closure, 20 something years later. All of these thoughts and experiences that had been piggybacking onto the rest of my thoughts and experiences had closure, which meant that they were on paper, I could let go of them, and I could move on still knowing that these things had happened and helped form me, but confident and secure that I had released them somehow, that I had freed myself from their weight, that I had processed them, and then I could move forward under less weight.

A lot of art is born out of pain, and that includes a lot of writing. But if you flip it around, a lot of healing can come out of writing. A lot of healing can come out of art. But as I said earlier, I don’t simply want to dwell on writing as healing. Not to say it isn’t because it’s very important. It’s a very important way to heal, as anyone who has written through grief or depression or illness or loss can attest. But I also want to talk about what my dear friend mentioned and that’s writing as maintenance.

And maybe it’s just me who is kind of stuck on this distinction because it’s kind of a small distinction. So there’s writing to heal, but there’s also writing to maintain. And I’ve spoken about this before on several different occasions, within and outside of my writer’s group, but I’m compelled to write, just as I am compelled to clean the plaque off of my teeth, just as I am compelled to clean my glasses when they’re dirty, just as I am compelled to eat, and sleep, and breathe. For me, writing is both as natural and as necessary as those other self-care items.

And maybe it is for you too. In fact, I hope it is. I know I’ve said this before, or maybe I haven’t because my memory is terrible, but human beings possess a creative spirit. And that creative spirit is a gift that is meant to be used, on a daily basis, for healing ourselves, for maintaining our own sanity, and for other reasons. But there’s something really beautiful, and I absolutely love this, there’s something immensely beautiful about the fact that in order to maintain ourselves, in order to stay healthy, we need to create. But it also makes things a little bit more difficult. We’ve talked before about work/life balance. And I think that there’s the temptation to think, “Oh, awesome. Yet one more thing to fit into my already packed day.” Because we have limited time. As I said to my good friend, Kristina earlier today, “At the end of the day, the day ends. There’s only 24 hours.”

And so adding another core item to our daily ritual, another aspect of self-care, in addition to cleaning and eating the right amounts of fruits and vegetables, and making sure that the pressure in our bike tires isn’t too low, and getting to work on time, and getting home from work on time, and turning in a report on time, making the bus on time, finding time to do something not terrible with your hair, finding socks that match. I could go on, but I won’t because I think you get the point. How do we fit writing in? I don’t have the answer, but I think it’s essential that we do. And I think that viewing it as a component of self-care, viewing it as a necessity for your own mental and perhaps even physical health can help encourage you to set aside the time to write every day.

I feel like one of the healthiest times in my life was when I was in college. Not simply because I was younger and surrounded by friends all the time, which was kind of nice, but because I was taking advantage of this beautiful new thing called blogging. My friends and I all did this, we all had, what was it? Xanga accounts? Xanga with an X, of course. But my friends and I were all on Xanga and all we did was essentially every day, whenever I wanted to procrastinate, because I am a great procrastinator, whenever I didn’t feel like finishing up a paper or doing some reading, I would blog.

And as I’ve mentioned before, this was a great way to sort of externally process what was going on in my day. It was a way to process my stress levels, which are usually pretty high. But most importantly, and I think this is where I want to go with this talk, it was a way to be seen, and to stay connected, and to not go invisible. And I want to call this out as important and I want to do it without sounding like a massive narcissist. I think that in addition to a fundamental need to eat, and sleep, and create, we also have a need to be seen, and acknowledged, and understood, validated if you will. I mean, that’s one of the biggest reasons that social media has been such a huge success. Every like on Facebook is a validation, every RT on Twitter, validation, you get the picture.

But we need that. And I think especially a lot of writers who tend to be introverts, as much as we don’t like to admit it, and as much as we have a tendency to hide ourselves away, or as much as, as much as we say we don’t need it, I think we all at the end of the day, for the most part, crave human interaction. We need to feel like we matter and that we are loved.

So shortly after I graduated college, I moved to Chicago, where I lived in a tiny garden apartment, A.K.A. basement, in the Ukrainian village at the intersection of Augusta and Noble. And I learned a very important lesson. I learned that it is possible to feel entirely alone, even when you are surrounded by millions of people, even in a city that never sleeps, when all you need to do to see another human being is look out of your window at the cars outside, at the people walking by, sleeping in alleyways, lining up to get on the bus. I learned the hard way that it’s so easy to feel alone and invisible and unacknowledged and insignificant. And I stopped writing in my blog because everyone else stopped writing in their blogs. And there was nobody to see or witness or share the experiences that I was sharing. And this is all leading up to my next point.

So I’ve talked about writing is healing. I’ve talked about writing as maintenance or necessity. I want to talk about writing as a social exercise. And I don’t mean a bunch of people getting together and writing together, although that is incredibly fun and I’ve done that because I’m a huge dork and it’s awesome. What I’m talking about is knitting together a fabric of importance, and in fact helping to heal others.

I grew up in Cleveland and my dad was a pastor. He was the director of pastoral care at a hospital. And I remember so vividly, I would walk with him, downtown Cleveland, we’d always be going to the Natural History Museum, to the art museum, to Severance Hall. And I remember outside of the Cleveland Art Museum, there’s a pond with a path around it. And we were just out getting some exercise and this homeless man shuffles up to my dad and he grabs his arm and he says, “Father, am I forgiven?” And my dad with eternal compassion and grace assured him that he was, and the man smiled and went on his way. That wasn’t the only time something like that happened. And I think it comes from a fundamental need for us to be seen, and to be validated, and to share in a healing experience.

How does this relate to writing, you may ask? This is in fact one of the main reasons I feel compelled to write. I witnessed my dad improving people’s lives, and sharing with them peace and hope and love. And some part of me can’t let that go. Some part of me needs that to become, not only part of my life, but part of my self-care. I’m compelled to write, I’m compelled to help people, I’m compelled to share love. Sorry if this is getting cheesy, I didn’t intend it to. But I think this is important, because I think that along with writing as self-care, this is where this is hopefully going to come full circle, I think a lot of us read as self-care. We read to heal. We read to connect, with people, with other worlds, with other ideas and thoughts and dreams and aspirations.

And someone needs to write the things that we read, to heal, and to feel whole, and to be ourselves, and to learn and grow. And why can’t that writer be you? Why can’t you be the writer that facilitate someone’s healing? And I’m not saying that you need to write a self-help book. And I’m not saying that you need a degree in psychology, or that you need to counsel someone through depression or loss or grief. What I’m saying is that creating art, that writing, is a social event. It’s a conversation. And when you write and when you heal yourself, if you let someone else read that, they may find in that healing and wholeness.

So if I can ever do that for somebody, if I can ever write in a way that heals others, that helps them feel loved and whole, that helps them feel understood, that helps them see new things, that helps them see beautiful things, that helps them receive the healing they need, then I absolutely want to do that. Because at the end of the day, I don’t think we write simply to write. Being compelled to write is not why I write. I just realized this, so thank you for bearing with me. Rather, I am compelled to write because I am compelled to create as I’m compelled to heal.

I asked one of my friends, my very good friend, JP Schroeder, in Griffith, Indiana about his writing lately. He’s a teacher, and he is often very exhausted, he teaches high school students and middle school students. But I want to share with you something he shared with me. And really this is one of my absolute favorite things about writing as self-care. JP says, “It had been two months since I had written a single word on my novel, which I had left as a twisted mess of incomplete and unnumbered chapters. And at the same time afraid that I wouldn’t get back to it. Then I sat down in an idle moment, churned out a couple pages, a few clever lines, and now it all feels possible again. Those two pages reminded me, ‘I can do this.'”

And so this is where I get into the self-perpetuating segment, where I talk about the fact that the act of creating can remind us about the possibilities inherent in creating, in writing. And that the hope of possibility, the knowledge of that possibility, can sustain us to continue creating, to continue healing ourselves, caring for ourselves, and caring for others.

So this podcast is maybe getting a little more introspective than I had originally planned, but I hope you’re okay with that. I hope it provides value to you. I hope that it gets you thinking about your own reasons for writing and your own need to write, or need to create if you’re not a writer. And I hope that you let me know your thoughts. If you go to my website, sarahwerner.com, that’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com, you’ll see a contact page. If you just head there, there’s a space for your email and a little paragraph. Share your thoughts. And let me know if you want me to share your thoughts on the air.

I’m kind of thinking that I really need little musical sound effect things to transition from one section of my podcast to another, because I want to talk to you about my book of the week. The book of the week is The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson. The Cold Dish is a mystery. It’s the first in Johnson’s Walt Longmire series, which incidentally has been turned into, I believe a series on Netflix, which I have not seen, but it’s about a sheriff in a small town in the very sparsely populated state of Wyoming. And what stuck out to me was not the plot, which was good and interesting and thrilling, but, oh my gosh, does this guy have a gift for language and character.

There’s some foul language, so if that’s not your cup of tea, then pick up another cup of tea. But I just want to read you a few passages from this novel, because it almost feels as though Cormac McCarthy wrote a mystery set in Wyoming. The language is just so sparse, and yet weighty, descriptive, beautiful, and not to speak disparagingly of the mystery genre, because it is probably one of my top three genres. They often tend to be very factual or very case file-esque or simply very plot driven. And perhaps this is simply my own failing, but I haven’t picked up a lot of mystery novels that really explore language as an art. At least not in the way that this book does. I just want to read for you a couple sentences from the very beginning of the book.

The Cold Dish, Chapter One. “Bob Barnes says they got a dead body out on BLM land. He’s on line one.” She might’ve knocked, but I didn’t hear it because I was watching the geese. I watched the geese a lot in the fall, when the days get shorter and the ice traces the rocky edges of Clear Creek. The Sheriff’s Office in our county is an old Carnegie building that my department inherited when the county library got so many books, they had to go live somewhere else. We still got the painting of Andy out in the landing of the entryway. Every time the previous sheriff left the building, he used to salute the old robber baron. I’ve got a large office in the south side bay, which allows me an unobstructed view of the Big Horn Mountains to my right and the Powder River Valley to my left. The geese fly down the Valley South with their backs to me, and I usually sit with my back to the window, but occasionally I get caught with my chair turned. This seems to be happening more and more lately.”

Even those opening paragraphs establish a metaphor that will be used throughout the novel, which again, in my own limited scope of reading, is just so rare for a mystery. It is so worth the read, please do read it, and let me know what you think.

Thank you for listening to Episode Three of the Write Now podcast, Writing As Self-Care. Again, I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you would like to send me an email at hello at sarahwerner dot com. Or otherwise, visit my website and go to the contact page, or to the show notes for this episode, and leave your thoughts there.

I’d like to send out special thanks today to a couple of people, including my very first Patreon patron, Rebecca Werner. Thank you so much for helping me to produce this show. I’d like to thank JP Schroeder for sharing with me his own personal writing story. I’d like to thank my dear friend who shall remain nameless, who first shared with me the idea of writing as self-care. I’d like to thank Mark Henderson, Peter Aadahl, and the rest of the team at Click Rain for being so enthusiastic and supportive about me starting this podcast. You guys are awesome.

And finally, I would like to thank you again for listening. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, I do host the Write Now podcast on my own time and my own time. If you’d like to help contribute to keep my podcast up and running, I would dearly appreciate it. Within the show notes for today’s episode, you’ll find a link to my Patreon page. Patreon is a really simple and lovely service that lets people who care passionately about the arts support artists.

Otherwise, this has been the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion, and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner, and thank you for listening.

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