Writing is an outlet. Without it, I’d be lost. Even more lost than I am. Don’t pretend like you don’t know what being lost is like. You don’t have everything figured out, ever, in life. Whether you’re a kid, a teenager, a twenty-something, in your thirties, forties, middle age, beyond over the hill, in your seventies, eighties, or even nineties, nothing is certain. Life throws curveballs every single day. Some are major life events, and others are tiny, mostly insignificant parts of a person’s day.

Writing provides the relief that merely talking to someone else about won't always give to you. The act of writing is so therapeutic. Writing should make you feel something. Good writing moves us to write more and express ourselves, too.

Try to tell me otherwise, or convince me that writing is not important. You will fail to win that battle. I’ll never stop writing. I’ll never stop expressing myself in this way.

Today I’m writing to tell you that you can heal your emotional ailments with spilling words from your brain into a Word document or onto a physical page.

Writing is good. Not always positive, or quality, or right, but it is good. It heals. It challenges. It questions. Use writing daily to uncover the good, which can be found amidst the terrible, sad, uncertain. When there seems to be no hope, just wait. There will be some. In the meantime, write away your problems for a while by getting your frustrations out of your mind, without worrying about finding someone to talk to. Plus, sometimes the words flow more easily when you’re not pressured by possible judgement. Writing is private unless you choose to publish it, or keep it somewhere that a person could easily read it, or decide to share it with someone close to you.

Everybody hurts, everybody cries, just not always in front of people. I think that writers pour their hearts, tears, and souls into their writing if they are truly committed to a piece or a story.

This started out as a one liner that I saved for later. That’s how the magic of words and writing happens. People probably think that writers have everything - in terms of ideas - at once, and I’m here to tell you that we don’t. If that, we have less together than non-writers (or people who don’t enjoy writing for fun) have together, because of our tendency to think about things too long.

Overthinking and writing go hand in hand. But sometimes, that can be so good for your stories. You can use an experience to emphasize the events in a short (or long) story, and that ability to insert yourself into that situation from the past will make it easier to write about. That fact is an exciting part about writing, because once you’ve had something happen to you, writing about it is the easy part.

You’ve already faced it. Even if it is a sad time that you’re writing about, you can add in previous happy times, or compare it to an exciting moment in your life, and possibly what happened in between. But even the most troubled situations that arise in life are worth writing about.

Write the hard stuff. Write about things that make you angry, write about things that make you cry, that make you FEEL something. It doesn’t always have to be positive, or make you feel good.

Just write, it will be worth it.