TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

People ask me sometimes if writing is like therapy for me. They want to know if writing about the most difficult times of my life was therapeutic. They want to know if it “healed” me, or at least helped me feel better. I think I understand why this line of questioning is so common—or, there’s an impulse behind it that I think I’ve come to understand.

Many of my dearest friends are grappling with big things right now: the end of a long-term relationship, or the declining health of someone they love, or a diagnosis that caught them off guard. Everyone I know is grappling with something big, honestly. They’re all trying to find ways to cope. No wonder we want to know what coping strategies work for other people! By asking if writing is therapy for me, I think what people are really asking is, “Will this help ME?”

I’m pretty frank with people when I answer this question. No, I don’t think of writing as therapy. For me, therapy is therapy. And when I’m not actively in therapy, I have other ways to calm my mind: meditation, walks in the woods, running, listening to music. 

Writing doesn’t calm my mind—it does the opposite! It wakes me up! Writing about an experience helps me enter it more fully, and think more deeply into it, and neither feels particularly therapeutic. When I write, my goal isn’t to heal from an experience, it’s to articulate it—to myself first, and then to others. Articulating an experience helps me see it more clearly. Helps me understand it. Sometimes that feels like the opposite of healing. It’s an opening, or a re-opening. 

Writing opens me up to the stuff of life. It’s a way of being as fully alive and aware as possible. I think that’s why I do it.

I know some people journal daily to process their thoughts, but I don’t. I don’t have a writing practice for my eyes only. When I write, my intention is to make something I’ll eventually share with others. That’s another reason it’s not therapy—it’s my work, and my life.

The next time I’m asked if writing is therapy, I may just respond by reading today’s poem. I think it answers the question with succinct, heartbreaking beauty. 

Do You Consider Writing to be Therapeutic?
by Andrew Grace

After my father died
I should have gone to therapy.
I tried instead to solve my grief
with alcohol and poems. 
Now I am almost 40
and all I can tell you about grief
is that when I found my father
on the floor of the machine shed
the radio was on and wind
pushed against corrugated metal.
Of course I still hear it.
I should have talked
to someone before now
and not you. Poetry is not talking.
This is just art
and therefore could never
cover my ears when I, suddenly,
am back in the shed
and I learn again that my father
has died every day
since he died.

"Do You Consider Writing to be Therapeutic?" by Andrew Grace. Used by permission of the poet.