Writing for Wellbeing

Writing is a quiet wonder for mental health. There’s a reason so many teenagers dive into writing journals, diaries, and poems, during those years of so much hormone-and-identity upheaval. As we emerge into adulthood, though, we mostly ditch that. We forget what a wonderful help it can be, and we think everything we do has to be “good”.

Here’s a secret: writing can be good and good for us. Sometimes turn by turn; sometimes at the same time. Sometimes just good for us and we turn it into something good later.

I’ve written here before about how much writing can help our wellbeing. In The Wheelchair and the Cushion of Art, I described how it’s helped me navigate heartache, depression, and living with a chronic illness. In The Joy is in the Doing, I wrote about how process-focus brings back the joy (and the productivity!) and how I wrote myself back to health from a massive stress crisis. You Are Not Ark Fleet B explored how during the pandemic, everyone took refuge and respite in the arts – the films, TV, books, music, that helped us hold on: ”We can call it respite. We can call it mental health. We can look to the physical health benefits of easing stress, and how much that heals, how much it wards off. We can look to the societal benefits of not going berserk with cabin fever…” And why “even if no-one ever reads what you write, society is better for you writing.”

That’s because writing is amazing for wellbeing.

• Writing gives us respite. Whatever we’re dealing with – stress, heartache, grief, anxiety, illness, crisis, or even high-octane brain-fizzing excitement – we need a break, so we can be strong again tomorrow.
• Play, creativity, and flow-states protect us against stress. They literally physically protect our brains, and help us grow new neural connections, so we can respond more flexibly.
• Writing helps us process things. Instead of staying stuck, writing can hep us move through the emotions and thoughts, and emerge from it.
• Making something supports our sense of self. Crying on the sofa because you’re in so much pain that you can’t even put a ready-meal in the oven sucks. Writing a poem about it doesn’t get the ready-meal in the oven, but now you’re someone crying on the sofa and someone who’s written a pretty spiffing poem. And where the emotion is, there’s also a poem or story there now, as a container to help hold the emotion.
• Writing offers us free self-expression. Our full, varied, and wild selves can emerge on the page. That’s especially useful when our inner self feels constrained by work, by public face, by caring for others first, all the things that adulthood requires of us. From the page, it can even creep more into the world: a freer more playful sense of self.

All of this is good for us, and good for those around us. We’re not being selfish or indulgent by taking time to write. How much better, for our partners, families, friends, colleagues, even people who cut us off in traffic, if we’re rested, unstressed, flexible, able to process our feelings, and whole in our selves? (And it’s easier to ask for help with the ready-meal if you’re not a snapping resentful ball of rage. IME.)

Writing’s not a cure-all or a replacement for all mental-health support. After years of writing a poem a day, when “the blue curtain” kept cropping up, I finally booked therapy for my medical PTSD. Six sessions of EMDR therapy sorted that out, but its presence on my notebook pages took it from the shadows to booking an appointment.

Writing is an amazing power tool in our tool box. So here are my best tips for writing for wellbeing, from an amalgam of research, my experience, and my students’ experiences.

• Write by hand if you can. This has so many benefits that I’ve written a separate blog post about it.
• Don’t wait to feel okay – do it anyway. The same way we don’t wait for a headache to pass before we take a painkiller, you can sit down to write joyfully, grumpily, relaxed, or stressed. It still works.
• Make it a little treat. You don't want to drag a notebook onto a table cluttered with breakfast dishes or open another document straight after work for yet another chore to tick off: treat yourself a little. Sit somewhere you like, make your favourite drink, maybe put some music on. Take yourself out for coffee in a café or pub garden, if writing outside your home helps. Whatever modest effort makes it nicer, even if that's just putting the dishes behind you where you can't see them!
• Drop your standards. This is always true for writing: we need to let ourselves write badly and go for quantity over quality, not so we churn out rubbish, but so we let ourselves experiment. You can still develop as a writer, try new techniques, and write amazing stuff that way. You’re more likely to, if you’re not rigidly demanding perfection from every word. It’s even more important to drop your standards when you’re writing for wellbeing. In that stress-state, I literally muttered “Doesn’t matter if it’s shit,” on repeat while I wrote. The measure of good writing time, here, is time spent writing. Stun your inner critic with “Doesn’t matter if it’s shit,” and just write. That’s where the flow lives. It might turn out good later, but let it be rubbish now.
• For fiction, don’t write about you. The more clear blue water between you and the main character, the easier it is to step through the magic doorway into writing-land, as I wrote about in The Characters That Let Your Stories Fly. Try out new characters, new genres, new approaches: variety breeds joy and creativity. It will always be self-expression, because it’s still you writing, the self will out, but of a much freer kind.
• For poems, mix between you and not-you poems. Sometimes you need to blurt or to shape acidic little ditties about exactly what you’re experiencing and feeling: that’s healthy and good. Sometimes you need to take a break and write about spores: that’s also healthy and good. As with stories, the you still emerges; the self will out. My spore poem ended up actually being about my tenuous relationship with hope and a disappointment I feared. It was a stronger poem for being ostensibly about spores, and when the disappointment came, I had the exact poem I needed.
• Try poems with formal constraints: syllable counts, rhymes, metre, specific end words, a refrain to work in, and so forth. Something marvellous happens when you’re excavating a grief but also counting syllables: new objectivity, a you inside and outside the feeling.

In early 2020, I was planning a series of thirty daily Poem Skills to coincide with national poetry writing month (NaPoWriMo) in April. When the pandemic hit in March, I redesigned it to support mental wellbeing, to help people find respite in calm absorbed flow, and ran it on the blog for free. I took all my experience of writing for wellbeing and made sure every topic offered people somewhere interesting, relaxing, or uplifting to put their minds. (The other things we need to express will emerge when they need to – like spores.) I alternated between poems with formal constraints and free verse (with optional forms), for the best of both worlds. I got so many lovely private messages from people who were finding, as I did, how much writing helped. In 2023, I ran it again, inside the Writers’ Greenhouse Community, this time adding flash-fiction (very short story) options in the same spirit of discovery, fun, and mental wellbeing.

And I’m thrilled to offer it to you now: reworked, spruced up, and expanded, as 30 Days of Writing. Whether that’s 30 days in a row, or every few days, or whatever works for you. It’ll teach you loads about poems and stories, because it’s me who made it (I’m a teacher: the self will out), but the sunlight flooding it all is writing for wellbeing. Because writing can be good, and good for us, and a joy.

So if you’re looking for something to write, or an added regular practice, and especially if you want to write for wellbeing, you can start here and try the first three days for free.

I hope it brings you joy, peace, and delight.

You Are Not Ark Fleet B

In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams describes an overcrowded planet whose inhabitants decided to relocate. They divided the population into three groups: Ark Fleet A, all the rulers; Ark Fleet C, all the people who did the actual work; and Ark Fleet B, the rest – all the middlemen, such as the telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants. Ark Fleet B left first, to prepare the new home planet for the others, and… Ark Fleets A and C settled back into life, in a less overcrowded planet. Rid of the fluff.

At the start of the pandemic, we all got a fresh perspective on whose jobs to value. The bin collectors, the delivery drivers, the medical staff. With a cousin in the army, helping with logistics, and his partner a front-line nurse, I jokingly but sincerely referred to myself and my work as “Ark Fleet B”: the inessential fluff that an indulgent late-stage society has developed, which the planet and its people are better off without. I even named our group-chat that.

They were saving lives and keeping people alive. I was stuffing handouts in envelopes and arranging absurd stuff on a slice of wood on a lazy susan and filming it while I pushed it round with a wooden spoon. Spot the difference. I know a lot of creatives felt similarly.

But during that same period, everyone, including me, was turning to the arts, and specifically to immersive stories, to keep ourselves sane, to look after our fraying mental health, so we could all do the life-and-death essential functioning we needed to. At the same time as I was mocking myself as a pointless Ark Fleet B person, I was recording creative-writing audios for my students, creating a Poem-a-Day project that offered respite from anxious thought, filling my website with free writing resources, and advertising those instead of my courses.

I knew that writing helped people find a respite of calm, absorbed flow, which they urgently needed. Likewise, I was writing daily poems myself, as a constant essential practice to hold myself together. Likewise, my partner and I were mainlining stories in the evening: books, TV series, whatever could absorb us and give us respite so we could carry on.

When my army cousin and his nurse partner got home, shattered from what they’d been doing, rigid with worry – they also sought stories, in film or TV or books, so they could recover, so they could carry on.

When people needed poems for funerals, because they needed to say what this meant and couldn’t find the words, those were there too. Written by people who probably felt they belonged on Ark Fleet B, recommended by people who felt their knowledge of poetry was 100% Ark Fleet B candidacy.

The arts in general, and stories specifically, were a mental-health lifeline. People had made those stories. People who were probably also feeling like they belonged on Ark Fleet B. We can call it “escapism”. We can call it respite. We can call it mental health. We can look to the physical health benefits of easing stress, and how much that heals, how much it wards off. We can look to the societal benefits of not going berserk with cabin fever, not fighting with the only person you’re allowed to touch, not blowing up the new group-chat with stress-induced anger, not tumbling into conspiracy theories out of boredom-meets-helplessness-meets-terror.

This isn’t the indulgence of a late-stage society either, of people whose food is delivered in crates and whose refuse is carried away by trucks. Stories, poems, music, art, have been vital to every society throughout history, especially in the hardest times. They’re not the tip of our societal Hierarchy of Needs: they’re part of the foundation. All that’s changed is how we name the different ways that stories-poems-music-art combine, from cave art and bards to films, books, lyrics. It’s always been essential, and healing.

Your writing – you, writing – isn’t inessential fluff or indulgence. You’re not Ark Fleet B. You’re a healer. Even if no-one ever reads what you write, society is better for you writing. That strange half-hour of filming the Display of Curiosities left me calmer than I’d felt in days, which meant I could support other people and not crumble / start screaming / snap. If all it did was restore me, that was already enough to be a help to others. But it did more: it helped other people find that space, so that they could help others, and so on, rippling outwards.

The arts do so much else besides, but if ever you doubt, remember this: you’re not Ark Fleet B. Or A, or C. You’re more like trees: you help people breathe. Filling your leaves does good.

The wheelchair and the cushion of art

Note: Originally written in 2014; updated in 2024.

Recently, I've spent a fair bit of time in a wheelchair. I'm lucky in a few ways: in knowing it was temporary; in knowing roughly how long it would last, and in being a writer.

The first two consolations, and the why, are quick to explain. My endometriosis flared up unexpectedly and fast. I went from striding forth every day to working on the sofa and being wheeled about, but I know the drill with endo and I know the timings. I'm now on the upcurve and getting back my strength. [Narrator: Hahahahaha! But don't tell her that, it gave her hope.] As for the third consolation, ahh, that is my soft cushion against all life's odds:

Live with a constant passion,
reckless with your heart.
Refuse to accept your ration.
Throw out the old and start

again, and in your fashion,
rebel, play your own part:
nothing so shit can happen
that you can’t make it art.

I first wrote that poem, with a few variations, in my very early twenties, about heartache. The final lines, though, "Nothing so shit can happen / that you can't make it art" has played in my head through very different difficulties.

I believe it's important to get the order right, here: you don't have to go through shit to make good art, but any shit you go through can become good art. And that glimmering possibility of art makes the shit more bearable: that instead of simply freezing, gut-sobbing, or despairing in the slow erosive forces of banality, you tell yourself, "I will write this," and you observe.

In my similarly early twenties, I was badly depressed and had recently lost job, boyfriend, home, and country. I got a carework job looking after a 95-year-old woman who, unbeknownst to me, was starting to lose herself in dementia. I'd done carework before and loved it. This woman was nit-picking, hostile, insulting, aggressive, dismissive, irrational, and sneering. I was in no place to cope with that. I kept begging the agency for a replacement, but they kept cancelling my request after speaking to her during my two-hour break (the only two hours I wasn't on call and in her home).  I only recognised the dementia years later, retrospectively, when I read, Mother, Can You Hear Me?  by Margaret Forster.

At the time, though, I couldn't cope and I had to. So I saved it. I saved up every insult, aggression, and accusation she threw my way, to write up that evening. I kept a sprawling, barely fictionalised document to which I added each day's nuggets, late at night.  I knew I'd never be able to recreate the seventeen items that had to be on the breakfast tray, on pain of scathing attacks, remember the banana in the bathroom, or conceive a world in which the cooking bowl couldn't be rationally placed on the shelf below its rightful home. Saving it up stilled my tongue and buoyed me up when she mocked my upbringing or accused me of stealing the money I'd watched her give her grandson. Saving it up helped me keep patience with a once-kind woman who was losing her mind in a way I didn't recognise.

I would never wish that experience on my younger self any more than I would wish a wheelchair on my recent self, when I could've cried with longing to go walking and paint walls and plant herbs. But at least I know I can save these things up, and use them for writing, give them a purpose beyond enduring the moment, and for that I'm grateful.

It reminds me of my slow attempts to overcome arachnaphobia. Ten years ago, a housemate's friend, seeing my reaction to a house spider, bought me an illustrated book on insects with several chapters on spiders. If I could start identifying them and realise they weren't dangerous, he figured, it might help. Even the pictures were difficult to look at, but he was right: not because I was identifying the spiders as harmless (I already knew they were) but because through my terror I was applying pure, cooling observation. Interest, intellectual curiosity, is a powerful force.

I'm hesitant to moralise here, even when the "moral" is self-evident. I believe that no-one outside a situation gets to tell someone how they should feel about it at any given point. No-one gets to reassure or well-wish just so they can feel better about someone else's difficult situation. Just as no-one else gets to see me white with pain and mourning my walks and say, "Well, at least you can write about it!" That's for the person in the situation to think. But if one is a writer, or an artist, or writes, or makes art, or has some interesting means of observation and ekphrasis, at least there is that option: to observe, closely, and save it up, to use as art. 

P.S. Wheelchairs are amazing. Needing one can suck, but wheelchairs themselves are brilliant. If you're ever struggling with mobility, for whatever reason, don't wait as long as I did. Use the chair! There are wheelchairs just there for the using in museums, art galleries, supermarkets, garden centres, IKEA, all over the place. And no-one minds that you can walk too: if you couldn't, you'd be arriving in your own wheelchair, and those ones would be superfluous. They're for people who can walk too. A clear moral: make art when stuff sucks; use wheelchairs when you need them.