Writing

My wife says I'm a "verbal processor" whether it is through talking or conversations inside my own head. So, writing for me is a great way to help me process things going on in my life and around me in the world. So, if you too are verbal processors (the way you tend to solve problems in your life of one kind or another) then writing might be helpful to you to in solving all sorts of problems.

For example, some people (I have tried this too) write autobiographies of their lives in order to understand better who they are and how they got here.

You might say: "Well. They lived their lives. What else do they need to know?"

The answer is that often most of life is very "Reactionary" in the moment. It's sort of like playing football or driving a car when there are a whole lot of road hazards like people and cars going all over the place. All you can really do in the moment is to react, react, react. But, later you might want to think about what as really going on all your life. And that's where writing can be very helpful in helping you understand who you are and how you get to here right now beyond just all the reactionary stuff we all do just to survive day to day in all our lives.

When I look back in my life now, for example, I find I was happiest from about 5 to 18 and then I was happy from about 32 to 37 and then I was happy from about age 50 to the present ongoing.

But, that doesn't describe all of it either. It just means that 18 to 32 was very difficult for me. and it means 37 to 50 was difficult for me and that the rest of my life looking back on it was mostly okay.

However before 18 I really didn't have a clue what was going on if I'm honest with all of you about it because I didn't have enough experience to realize just how happy I was with my parents in my life.

Though my 2nd wife and I never speak now we were very happy from 1980 to 1985 or 87 even though the next 7 years or so were some of the most lonely years and unhappy years even though we were still married then.

So, people change and life circumstances change and often there is nothing you can do to make it better and all you can do is endure it or not. If I hadn't suffered so much in my early 20s I never could have made it from 37 to 50 either after my father passed away in 1985.

So, writing (if you are actually honest with yourself and others) can be incredibly healing and help you forgive yourself for all the relatively ignorant decisions you made at different points in your life because you just didn't know any better yet because you hadn't had enough experience to make better decisions than you did.

So, learn to forgive yourself so you don't just keel over with cancer one day 50 years before your time.

Learn to understand yourself and to forgive yourself so you can have a great rest of your life, and writing can be one way to heal yourself and to help heal others as well.