I’ve Been Using Writing for Therapy My Entire Life
Why stop now?
I began writing two weeks ago because I was waking up anxious, unable to go back to sleep. Big changes were occurring in my life. I quit the job I dreamed about since I was 9. I’m six months into my first marriage. We’re taking steps to move to a city neither of us have lived in before — I’ve spent a grand total of 24 hours there to date.
But the biggest thing keeping me up was trying to figure out what had happened that was making me feel so terrible. Regularly anxious, aches and pains all the time, trouble sleeping, begging my spouse to fill my coffee mug because getting off the couch felt like so much effort, I kept waking up searching for answers to two painful, unrelenting questions: Is there something wrong with me? What do I need to do to fix it?
The identity crisis of leaving my dream job only three and half years in was eating away at me. What had I gotten all this education for? Why couldn’t I push through like a functional adult? What was I going to do with myself now that I was unwilling to use the skills I developed for the kind of job I trained for? Will I ever be able to work again?
For the past three and a half years, I had only been writing sermons. Often I’d been writing them on Sunday mornings because I couldn’t get myself to write them during the…
