Writing is what I do. It always will be what I do. The problem is I can’t stop doing it. Or perhaps it’s that I won’t stop doing it. Either way, I’m an addict. I sit up all night writing and find that I can’t get up in the morning. I have a bad back and to sit in front of a computer screen for hours at a time can really become a pain…literally. Some who don’t know me will ask why this is a problem. Okay, so I’m addicted to writing, what’s so bad about that? Could be worse, it could be drugs.

This is a problem for me, and not just me but other writers I know as well. Most of us who write fiction, poetry, sonnets, haikus, anything creative, use it to vent. We hate someone, instead of going out and trying to kill them we write about it. A person you were dating broke up with you, write about him/her. You got fired. Write about it. You express your emotions in graphic detail and hope it’s good. Once again you’re asking where the problem lies. I’ll get to that, be patient.

My sophomore year in high school I met a boy (notice I use the term ‘boy’ instead of ‘guy’ or ‘man.’) started to date him, and had a relationship for two years. I broke up with him only to find out he was cheating on me. The entire relationship damaged my emotional self. I did the only thing natural to me, I wrote about him…in graphic detail. My issues with him were so deep that every time I tried to write about him to purge myself of the memories I ended up feeling worse. Because I was reliving those moments, cutting open scars that weren’t healing, I kept falling into depression…I fell hard.

Since I couldn’t forget my hate for him and move on, I kept writing about him, the pieces I wrote weren’t good enough to express what I really felt. These words aren’t what I really felt. These words don’t feel right. This whole piece is wrong. Since it didn’t help get my feelings out, my depression grew and I couldn’t get out of it.

Because writers revisit their darkest fears, most intimate desires, and traumatic experiences, we hope that writing about it will make us feel better. Because we open those scars again and again, in the end we don’t’ feel better because we don’t move on and forget. Live and learn. We don’t let those scars heal. It drains us and breaks us down.

My current boyfriend helped heal these scars. Not my writing. I found out that he feels the same way about writing. He’s currently writing a lot of poetry that is about his father whom he has a love/hate relationship with. After the poems he felt angry at his father and keeps writing about him. He also writes about his mother and begins to feel even more hateful. He doesn’t feel better, even if modern therapists tell patients that it will make him feel better. He becomes drained of life, emotion and happiness. The process keeps repeating.

During my youth I was diagnosed with Depression and was put on medication. I wrote poetry that I figured would make me feel better by calling out my inner demons. I was in a real bad state of mind, so my poetry was scrambled, disorganized and blatantly hateful. It was driving me insane that I couldn’t’ dictate my emotions to paper to help my inner sanity release my depression. After I wrote a poem I went into a mad state of mind that would rip the poem, scratch words out, scream and yell about how I have no future as a published writer, and then would walk into the kitchen for the nearest knife. My own writing was turning me into a monster that became more distorted with every poem. It obviously didn’t help, my poetry, and I was put in the children’s psychiatric ward at the tender age of 14.

Am I helping you understand? Writers don’t have it easy. Even as I type this assignment I feel that this is not explaining my thesis correctly. So after I’m done writing I will feel worse because I feel like I’m going to fail at getting my point across.

The process keeps repeating…