If I Ever Stopped Writing

I saw this quite a while back on Shilpa’s blog in response to The Insecure Writer’s Support Group prompt  — If you ever stopped writing, what would you replace it with? This is a brilliant question! I thought about what I’d do if I ever stopped writing, especially what I write in my Morning Pages and my journals. It’s taken me a long time to write this!

If I Ever Stopped Writing

If I ever stopped writing, I think I’d have to replace it with therapy. Writing has always been a way for me to untangle the chaos in my mind, to find clarity, and to express things I rarely say out loud. But if I didn’t have that outlet anymore, I’d need something just as honest, just as raw, and just as challenging. Therapy feels like the closest alternative—someone to listen, to reflect things back to me, and to help me navigate the things I usually pour onto the page.

I think it would be different, though. Writing feels solitary and private, like a secret conversation with myself. Therapy would introduce another person into the process, forcing a real-time confrontation with my thoughts and feelings, instead of the safe, edited version I usually present. Maybe that’s what I’d need if writing wasn’t an option—a way to go deeper, to let someone else carry the weight of my words when I can’t hold them alone.

I’d miss writing, though. There’s something irreplaceable about seeing your thoughts take shape on a blank page. But maybe therapy would teach me something new about letting go, about surrendering control, and about finding the same release in speaking that I’ve always found in writing.

Let me share something Julia Cameron wrote in her book ‘The Right to Write‘

We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes it directly and specifically our own. We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful form of prayer and meditation, connecting us both to our own insights and to a higher and deeper level of inner guidance.

We should write because writing brings clarity and passion to the act of living. Writing is sensual, experiential, grounding. We should write because writing is good for the soul. We should write because writing yields us a body of work, a felt path through the world we live in.

We should write, above all, because we are writers, whether we call ourselves that or not.

The more I think about, I know that I’m hardly likely to give up writing. Why would I? 🙂