Writing as A Personal Form of Therapy.

How I Used Creative Writing to Help My Mental Health

By

K.J.B. Rickards

In early 2020 I found myself returning to the High School I attended over twenty-five years ago. I knew the school librarian from the primary school playground where our children share a class. We had both shared a love of writing and she knew I had various published stories and articles, so she invited me to talk to the current pupils about writing back in September 2019. Overwhelmed with impostor syndrome, I agreed to a date, probably after Christmas. During the period in between, the school unfortunately had a suicide and a second attempt. The school acted quickly and introduced a mental health awareness week to which I received an invitation to participate. My talk to a small class of interested pupils became four talks to over two-hundred pupils and evolved into an essay entitled Writing as Therapy.

I like to think it helped some of them.

I like to think it can help someone reading this.

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I left school in 1993 with five GCSEs grade C and above. The whole time I was at school it all felt important and significant, and yet I only really remember three things – my mum dying in year seven, the smell of the form room/dining room, and appearing on a TV show called Blockbusters. I left school and drifted my way through the primary, secondary and tertiary industries. I was a chicken farmer, freezer warehouse operative, illegal immigrant cocktail barman in Kavos, plastic bag maker, cushion maker, bender in metal factory, chef, pub/restaurant manager on the Thames, foreign language book seller, data analyst, TV extra, computer builder, customer service / IT helpdesk.

I dreamed of escaping the mundanity. I hated the gloomy tones of Lancashire. As an escapism, I dreamed up stories hoping that this novel or that film would pave my way to a more fortunate future. But I never wrote anything down.

Then my wife and I said bollocks to it and moved to France to sell food and drink out of a cabin on a beach. Within a week I missed a stop sign and was T-boned by a truck putting my wife into a coma and destroying her pelvis. We returned to Lancashire and depression and the demons took over my thoughts.

Then for my birthday my wife bought fifty pencils and a pile of notebooks. It was a massive symbolic gesture. I began to practice writing. The first thing I wrote was based upon the French car crash, but I spiced it up with programmed assassins and a cat and mouse chase with secret government agencies. What I was really doing was exorcising those demons and the guilt. I discovered that writing fiction helps you deal with the conflict and tension in your own life. You get to be in control of the events.

You eventually become happy with a piece of work and send it off to a competition or publisher. It gets rejected and rejected and rejected and you’re devastated. You move onto the next piece. It gets rejected. You go back to the writers’ groups. You share your tales of rejection. The feedback loop is great. People are reading your work and listening to your voice. In most cases they give back helpful insight. Then something strange happens, you start to wear the rejections as medals. It means you finished something, and someone read it. Someone listened to you thoughts.

If I was your teacher, and I’m nowhere near qualified to be one, I’d set up a writers’ group just so you can have the collaboration of creatives.

Most of us are aware of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

Creativity is right at the top. But I think it’s essential to our mental wellbeing. Whether it is writing, painting, making music, making tiktok videos or even playing football, we need to it. On our own or collaboratively. Personally, creativity is in my love needs section of mental health. It then gives me the feeling of accomplishment for my ego needs – I get a bit manic. I’ll be bouncing around the house singing the Murder She Wrote theme tune and generally annoying anyone in my vicinity. This takes me to the apex of the pyramid, and I become more creative and the process begins to loop; the more I write, the more creative I become.

Next thing you know you’ve won a competition, or someone wants to publish your Top 10 list on their website. Someone publishes your short horror story. An American magazine will publish your parody Vice Magazine article. A Mancunian poetry anthology wants to print your poem about the gripes of being a 43-year-old man. And suddenly you find your new outlet; your new kick, because writing helps you deal with the conflict and tension in your own life. You can dig into your own subconscious. You can find your own fascinating self-revelations. You can exorcise those nagging demons. You can even sing the Murder She Wrote theme tune if you wanted. Hopefully you’ll have fun and find catharsis along the way. All without costing you a penny (unless like me you wish to purchase the book your poem was printed in).

So, If I was your teacher, and let’s not forget I’m nowhere near qualified enough to be one, I tell you to just write & write anything you want, however you please. I can’t tell you what or how to do it. I just think you should. I reckon you can even do better than this postman who gives lectures about being a local writer to the pupils at his old school.