At the start of Covid, when days slowly bled into each other, I started journaling as a way to document my days, searching for the differences between them. I never expected anything to come of my journaling habit except for maybe a better grasp of the timeline of my life. What I found instead was a better understanding of both my inner world and the outer one, new ways to connect with others, and more avenues through which to express myself.
Through journaling, I started to notice patterns in my behaviors and connections between my circumstances and my reactions. I found an outlet where I could express the difficult feelings I didn’t want to admit to having, from crippling anxiety to severe depression and everything in between. I’ve spent most of my life minimizing my own emotions for my own benefit and for the comfort of those around me, and writing helped me come to terms with some of those feelings so that I could begin to heal and grow.
Eventually, journaling led me back to my teenage love of poetry. When I struggled to form sentences, I jotted fragmented thoughts onto sticky notes, eventually assembling them into longer poems. When I started writing poems in high school, wrought with teen angst, I filled notebooks with themes of pain, suffering, and death, trying to convey the discomfort I felt about my own life. As an adult, fully aware that I felt bad but other people felt worse, my poems became a source of joy. I laughed as I crafted them, instead of forcefully injecting each verse with exaggerated pain. In a world that had become suddenly heavy, I found respite in my little nonsense, non sequitur poems. They had become a gathering place for me to store and share my observations about life that had no other home and didn’t come up naturally in conversation. I began keeping stacks of sticky notes at my desk in case a phrase or line of a poem came to me while I worked from home. Slowly, my daily routine molded itself around my writing. I bookended my day with pen and paper, waking up and journaling, then sprawling on the floor and assembling poems after dinner.
After a little over a year of collecting sticky notes of what I called “poem thoughts,” I realized that some of my ideas and feelings were too big for my poems. I could start to make more meaningful poems, I thought, but I feared a return to the angsty poetry of my high school writing career. So instead, I launched a newsletter. Painfully aware of how unsolicited my writing was at that point, I self-deprecatingly called it Essays No One Asked For. The newsletter gave me an outlet for my bigger thoughts, stories, and feelings. It gave me a chance to experiment with long-form writing and stringing thoughts together cohesively instead of simply bouncing from one idea to the next like a dizzy child on a trampoline. For the first time, I was sharing my writing with the public. Through this writing and sharing, I found a sense of connection I never expected to feel. People started reading and relating to me, even when I wrote about things that felt unique to me. We do not exist in a vacuum; there is someone else in the world that has shared even your weirdest thought. If nobody says it out loud or writes it down, the rest of us will continue living in isolation, thinking we’re alone. When one person is open, it creates opportunities for everyone else to open up, connect, and find community.
Writing has forced me to take a deeper look not only at myself but also at the world and all its structures and systems we rarely think about. I began to see the world not as merely something going on around me, but as inspiration. Inspiration for writing, but more importantly, inspiration for the kind of life I wanted to live. I started to find tiny moments of joy where before I saw none. I started to find meaning in monotony. Coincidences that were overlooked before suddenly became painfully obvious. I also started allowing myself to be fully seen for the first time probably ever. When the world lost all meaning, writing gave me something to care about.
Now I write for The Workbench, and I get to highlight businesses in the community that are doing amazing things. I get to talk with owners and entrepreneurs about their passions and then share their missions with the community. I get to use what brought me comfort and joy during a particularly dark time and hopefully bring a bit of comfort and joy to the lives of others.
Serena’s Tips for Writing for Wellness:
- Make it a habit – if you miss a day, a week, a month, or six, pick it back up without judging or reprimanding yourself
- Brain dump – let all the thoughts flow out of your brain and onto the paper in real time. Try to write without stopping, even if what you’re putting down doesn’t make any sense in the moment. You never know where a wandering thought could lead.
- Make it fun – the stakes could not be lower. You don’t have to write anything astounding (or even good), you just have to put words onto the page. Maybe you write about how you feel or something that happened to you or maybe you just write down words that you like together, even if you end up with a meaningless paragraph.
- Have a go-to first sentence – it can be easy to become paralyzed by empty pages and the fear of “ruining” one. Have a go-to sentence to put down for the days when you don’t know what to say. (Hint: I like to start by explaining what I’m doing or narrating the first thought that comes into my head.)
- Experiment with form – there’s no point in writing if you’re not having fun. Got a lot to say but struggling to convey it clearly? Try a poem. Have more to say than will fit? Maybe a paragraph or an essay or an entire novel. Change it up whenever you feel like it, even if that’s halfway through the page!
- There are literally no rules – writing for wellness doesn’t have to produce any results. The end goal isn’t to get a piece published in The New Yorker, it’s to find connection with yourself. Constraints can give direction to creativity, but if you start to feel suffocated by self-imposed rules, release them!
- Write like no one is watching. How else will you be honest? What is the point, if not honesty?
