How Writing Continues to Save My Life

I have struggled with my mental health since high school. I was the oldest child of four, so it was just a fact of life that unless I was in trouble or needed something, my parents didn’t really worry about me.

Which was fine because, for the most part, it left me to my own devices. Looking back, though, I really struggled with depression and what I later found to be undiagnosed bipolar disorder. But I was high-functioning, so it went unnoticed until my late 20s.

There were some pretty dark times before I was medicated, but medication doesn’t fix the root of the issue; it helps manage the chemical aspect of it. It wasn’t until I came out to myself and my wife as trans that I seriously went into therapy.

In the past five years, I have worked through a lot of emotional trauma from growing up. One thing that I realized when I looked back over the years was that two things kept me going when I wanted to check out.

The first is my kids, and later my wife as well.

The other is writing.

I will admit, sometimes it got so dark that the first one alone didn’t keep those thoughts at bay. With writing, though, I could channel those fears, frustrations, and anger into something creative. It was haphazard, though, and I wasn’t consistent in writing projects. This led to large gaps in creating, which gave time for depression and hopelessness to fester and spread.

In reality, it was when I got serious about writing as a career two years ago that I really discovered the benefits of a consistent writing schedule. It is easier to bolster my desire to stay when I have a project I am working on or have one in the hopper that I am excited about.

I have to see what happens in the story.

I am a plotter, but I am also a pantser. I’m like a weird hybrid. I build out the structure and plotting, but start with only a vague idea of what happens from one point to the next. It keeps it surprising.

In the past two years I have collected over 60 ideas for stories that I am excited about, so hopefully that means that I’ll be sticking around for quite some time.

I still have dark days, been teetering on the edge of one for the past couple of weeks. Some days, part of me doesn’t want to be here anymore.

But then there is that part of me that says, “Just wait, finish this story to see what happens. Then you can make a decision.”