When I don’t write, I feel as if something is missing–kind of like my day is incomplete without it. I might go for a day or two without writing, but if more than that, I will feel like my creative drive is shutting down–that the ideas that came with it will be lost forever.
And if that happens, I feel like I will go insane (in a figurative sense, of course). It’s kind of like wandering around aimlessly–without purpose. Or to put it another way, bottling up emotions that have nowhere to go. Eventually, they’ll come out negatively, such as in frustration or sadness.
And when I’m at that point, I’m just going through the motions, not thinking about anything deeply or analytically. My voice and ideas aren’t being heard. But with writing, it is an outlet for the creative side of our being, just as painting or playing music is an outlet for an artist or a musician. They are not themselves without expressing this nature.
There have been years where I’ve gone without writing, but I was doing something else that was creative or productive instead. For example, there was a year when I just focused on reading. I wrote very little that year, but I felt I had another outlet for my creative side. I didn’t feel incomplete.
For each individual, there is something that they have a yearning for, something where there is a drive to accomplish a creative goal, whether it is a book, a painting, a song, a website, etc. If we don’t allow ourselves the time to create, we feel restless, anxious, even sad or empty. It’s as if we’ll lose our minds if we don’t do what we feel called to, and the creative ideas that are associated with them will disappear.
So back to the title of this post, “Writing For Sanity Sake.” What this really means is that writing isn’t really about money, fame, popularity, or even being 100% right about something. Rather, it’s an obligation to a creative need–to express the ideas and emotions that are within us so that they exist in reality. And once it exists, it’s as if we’ve added something new to the world.
Fallton Havenstonne 