Write away your worries

[Forgive me for reposting this short piece, but I think some of my newer visitors may be interested in its content, which focuses on the excellent reasons to be a blogger even if it means you never win a Booker Prize.  It also fits in with my idea of “Blogging it out!”]

While I was flicking through a magazine yesterday [May 2010] I found this article on “writing away your worries.”  I wouldn’t normally use someone else’s work in my blog, but the article seemed not only relevant to me, but also to lots of the favourite blogs that I read.

“There is no doubt about it,” wrote Anne Frank in 1942, “that paper is patient.”  It is also entirely without judgement chronicling all manner of previously taboo issues (miscarriage, infidelity, abortion, prostitution...): to write is to confess, to purge, to exhibit, to seek absolution, support or solace.

“The very purpose of writing can be beneficial since we are giving ourselves permission to externalise something we have been carrying around in our heads,” explains psychotherapist Graham Thomas, who offers online counselling via the written word.  “It’s like setting a thought free: once it’s on the page – or screen – we can read it, delete it or reflect upon it.  Writing allows us to tap into the logical and creative parts of the brain as we weave meaning together.” 

Try it: take one of your conversations or confrontation which has troubled you – and write what you wish you’d said or the words of compassion you wish you’d been offered.  Writing a blog may have superseded diaries, but they are both a means of marshalling your thoughts.  But adds Thomas, this kind of writing is more about expression than grammar.

“It doesn’t have to be of a Booker Prize standard to have value; quite the opposite: this is about writing as a personal journey towards understanding.” 

Words reach out to us. 

In sharing words, we learn what matters to us. 

[In the course of reading through other people’s blogs I realise that lots of us may already be doing exactly what this article suggests.  I think I am.]