A small reason why I write is therapy. Not that I intended to do that, at least not at first. For a while in the middle, and even occasionally today, it can help me process some of my own difficult feelings. But the reality is writing can only do so much. At the end of the day, we must deal with how we feel, writing or not, and being unable to face your emotions is a hard thing to get past when so much of writing is steeped in channeling difficult emotions.
The reality is, whether it’s intended, and especially whether we expect them, all of us who write stories are going to have to deal with feelings that will be dredged up over the course of the story. And without coping skills to help us deal with those emotions, a lot of things can happen that may not be desirable. As a result, writing as therapy is limited to very specific times and formats to cope that are for me. Writing out the things that keep me up at night help me process my own feelings so that the heavy scenes don’t destroy me. Those handy coping skills thus have their own chance to shine. Thoss skills I’ve been cultivating over the years have helped me deal with a lot of unexpected emotions because some of the topics I deal with trigger my own feelings about them. Part of it is my own history of trauma, but part of it is some topics are just difficult to parse without good coping skills to work through the feelings. Topics like death and suffering are difficult for many, but being an author puts me into a position where I must be able to deal with them if I want to succeed.
So what are these magical coping skills I keep referencing anyway? Well, keeping in mind that they look different for everyone, after a difficult part I make space for myself and my own feelings. Maybe that means reading in bed. Maybe it means taking a hot shower or bath. A good meal that I don’t have often can help on occasion (though I don’t typically indulge in food every time I get triggered.) Or I’ll watch something lighthearted that I’ve seen a dozen times or more, to help soothe myself. Sometimes too I’ll lean onto my writing skills and write about my feelings and why I think I’m feeling them. This is not an exhaustive list, of course, and whether these work for you or not I can’t say. All I know is I’ve spent years trying out different ones to see what I vibed with the most. Coping skills aren’t something that will produce results overnight, and as a result you have to keep using them. But the more you do them, the more effective they’ll become.
At the end of the day art might come from a place of darkness and pain, but that doesn’t mean we have to stay there. It’s in my own not-so-humble opinion that, while writing can both be born from pain and be a way to cope with it, in order to be our best selves we have to put the work into becoming just that. Writing is a tool that can help, but if you truly want to be good at it you must be willing to face the darkness you carry. We all have parts of ourselves that live in the shadows, but it’s our job to shine the light into them as best as we can to hopefully chase that darkness away. Because if we don’t, none of us will get very far in life.