Writing

 I've written some about how I started writing when my cousin died in a car accident when he was 16 and I was 8. I was an only child and so to make myself feel better I wrote down what I was feeling in the hopes that it might help me. Also, at 8 I doodled a lot on the sides of where i wrote often too. I found that reading what I had written later that often I could solve my own problems once I had defined them.

In this way my problems always had someone who might solve them: ME in another time in the future.

Often when I read what I wrote I would be in a better frame of mind and since I was always very logical and reasonable as I faced problems in my life (most of the time) I often could find ways to solve my problems or at least better understand what was happening to me in my life and what was happening to those around me.

To an 8 year old the world in the 1950s wasn't a very friendly or forgiving place (from the point of view of an 8 year old who grew up then). So, finding a way forward was what I was trying to do in a world where people said we all were going to be nuked one day by the Russians or the Chinese. This was very real for people then simply because every family (it seemed) had lost one of it's members to World war II then. So, war was very very real for everyone because so many men and women had PTSD from World War II already. And then American boys were also later dying in the Korean War and in the 1960s and 1970s the Viet Nam war too.

Writing for me was a way to better make sense of a crazy world. The world is still just as crazy as it was then but in a different way.

I find the craziness sort of stays at a constant rate it's just that what is crazy is different slightly every year you live here on earth as everything changes.

So, writing can help you better make sense of the changes to your lives and the lives of those around you too. In this way it helps balance you and help you stay sane and current no matter what is happening in your life.