Therapeutic Writing

If I hadn't started writing in a journal starting when I was about 9 or 10 now it is likely I wouldn't be alive now. The danger times for me were 12 to 14 and 21 to 25. From 12 to 14 I was self destructive that easily could have been fatal because of puberty and childhood epilepsy combined. From 21 to 25 it was from breaking up with a girl I had planned to marry combined with being excommunicated from my childhood church.

So, for me, at least, writing that I mostly did not share with others until around 1999 after I had almost died for about 7 months. And then I realized that I could help people in the present, past and future who came upon my writings intuitively(seemingly by accident). But as many of us know there are No accidents in this universe of ours. Though many might not understand what I'm writing about, I always write multi-level so people can understand on many different levels what I'm communicating about.

What I'm doing in this particular article is to encourage all of you who are so moved to write about your experiences and feelings even if you have no one at all to talk to about your problems. What often happens is just writing about stuff releases the pain sufficiently so you stay alive. It also becomes a type of artwork that when you read it again, days, weeks, years or even a lifetime later, you are amazed by what you have written.

Through life all of us become many different people in order to survive the various times, situations and people in our lives. By reading of another person you once had to be, you in a way communicate through time with all your various selves. I don't know about you but I miss many of the different people I once was now I'm 61.

I think most of all I miss the person I was from 4 to 10 before I got childhood epilepsy and I miss the person I was between 30 to 37. Those are the two people I was that I miss the most. I miss the raw intelligence and youthful idealism of my 4 to 10 year old self and I miss the 30 to 37 year old because I finally knew what I was doing and hadn't started to lose my physical health yet. In other words my body didn't hurt every day so much yet. Even though I like myself much better now I miss my youthfulness and idealism even though those things tend in the long run to cause incredible pain as one is forced to become more and more pragmatic just to survive another day.