You might have noticed that I’ve been pretty inactive on my blog for the past few weeks. That’s because for most of May, I’ve been working on reading books by Brené Brown, a shame researcher who has written a number of best-selling self-help books. A teacher of mine who’s been helping me work on my mental and emotional wellbeing recently recommended that I read her work. I figured that a blog post about how these books are helping me would be a good way for me to reflect on my progress so far.
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Writing can be hard. Really, really hard. It’s easy to feel isolated and discouraged when it’s just you, Microsoft Word, and that ever-flashing tab reminding you that words are not going to type themselves, no matter how hard you glare at the screen. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the eleven or so years that I’ve spent dreaming up, writing, and often abandoning stories, it’s that finding a writing community is a great way to stay motivated. Participating in a writing workshop is one fantastic way to get a group of focused and passionate people to collectively improve their writing skills and offer constructive, critical feedback of each other’s work.
I’m going to preface this post by saying that I have never been officially diagnosed with a mental illness, but that I have had depressive episodes and tendencies toward social anxiety since high school. This post isn’t intended to do anything more than share my personal experiences. You should seek professional help if you have thoughts of suicide, or harming yourself or others.
As I’ve been struggling with some ups and downs in my personal life and my mental health, I’ve started thinking about how my mental health impacts my writing, and vice versa. As I sat down today (I started writing this on 1/16/18) to write my novel with my brain in a depressive fog, I found that it just wasn’t happening. But then, something weird happened. A poem came out instead—so I decided to write about why I think that happened. |
AuthorWriter, reviewer, bookseller, book nerd extraordinaire. Fiction reader at Waxwing Magazine. Archives
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