Morning Pages VS Suicide Notes
(Or, Why You Should End Your Week
Doing Something Creative)
There was a time when I thought of writing in rosy-colored, misty-background terms. It was a time when people asked me "Why do you write?" and I always came up with something as predictably quotable as "I write for the same reason I breathe -- because if I didn't, I would die. (Isaac Asimov)"
But then came a phase in my life when I actually stopped writing.
Oh, I still made grocery lists, filled out forms, signed my name on the right blanks and churned out 10-page business reports.
But creativity-wise -- and in the ways that really mattered -- I literally stopped writing, for the simple reason that there were too many other things I needed to do.
It went on for a month, and I became crabby. It went on for two months, and I started going crazy. My mind began to fill with depressing thoughts, self-defeating images, suicidal tendencies. They would start coming in in the morning, and haunt me throughout the day. I became generally unhappy with life and the world, and I didn't even know exactly what was wrong.
...until one day, I picked up a blank notebook and wrote.
I wrote about the thick air that seemed to choke me, about the thoughts that were slowly killing me, and named the many ugly-angry-black-brown emotions that I really didn't want to have.
Before I knew it, I was writing. And it started melting the depression away like ice cream.
I didn't know that cure could be so simple. I didn't know why I really wrote until then.
So now when people ask me why I write, I still say something as predictably quotable as "I write for the same reason I breathe -- because if I didn't, I would die."
But now I mean every word.
"Recovering Aileen"
Writer & Facilitator
www.PinoyWriters.Com
P.S.
Are YOU starting to feel depressed, or burnt out, or simply suicidal? Then join one of our Saturday creativity workshops at Goodwill Bookstore, Glorietta. It might not instantly make you famous, but it might help save your sanity... and your life.
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
- Rudyard Kipling
