This Women’s Collective Ireland-Donegal, ‘Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices’ feature is written by Siobhán Mc Laughlin. Siobhán is a poet and writer from Donegal, she has a MA in creative writing and is a creative writing facilitator who has been facilitating writing for wellbeing courses with women for WCI-Donegal this year. In this feature she reflects on the benefits of writing for wellbeing, talking about her own experience of writing and what she has discovered along the way

Writing for Wellbeing is a relatively new practice in the wellness field, but as anyone who writes knows, writing has always had therapeutic benefits. It’s just now they are being recognised.

If you’ve kept a diary at any stage in your life, you will be very familiar with this. A diary during those teenage angst years was a great way to vent all your turbulent feelings, from daily dramas to heartbreak crushes. Those pages of gushing would provide comfort and consolation, a listening ear, a way of uncorking all those bottled-up emotions. (And there was a reason why they used to come with a lock and key!)

Writing is a way to clarify thoughts, to unravel the jumble of them into clear concise visible ideas. Do you keep a to-do list? The power of such a simple thing to keep your head clear of worrying about things is very evident. When it’s written down, it’s out of your head and onto the paper. Like a magic spell, the words hold it there; it is no longer your mind’s job to do so. It can let go and relax.

To write something – to put your thoughts into words and onto paper – provides you with the space to listen to your own voice. Your real voice. Your inner voice. The one that is so often quieted, by other louder insistent voices in your life. To put pen to paper is to silence those other voices and like turning a radio dial, to tune into yourself again. Journalling is keeping a record of the story of your life, as told by you. And stories help make sense of things.

I’ve been writing since I was a child. Diary writing, story writing, letter writing, poems, blogs.  I loved the escapism of creative writing and later, the hyper-realism: how you can lose yourself in writing and simultaneously, find yourself there. Writing helps me work things out. It dissects emotions and feelings under the light of attention. It helps me unravel knots of thoughts and find out what I really am thinking/feeling. I would be lost without it.

I kept a diary/journal into my twenties and into it poured all my worries and wonderings, rantings and musings.  It was a catalogue of growing up, a space for reflection, and with reflection comes self-knowledge. It was where I examined with each word and sentence what exactly was going on in my life and what my responses to it were. It was a way to commune with my true self. When writing about things, I felt like I was making them ‘right.’ Telling myself the story of my life was a way to appreciate it as such and to look at it from a more knowledgeable perspective. Looking back on that time I can really say it was an invaluable practice.

Writing is a great way to express feelings. To get them ‘off your chest’ and out onto the page. There’s a great word for this from Greek called ‘catharsis’ – the act of releasing pent-up or repressed emotions. When you write about these feelings, they leave you. They are expressed. This is essential to our wellbeing. Therapists recommend it all the time. To write about how you are feeling acknowledges the feeling and puts you at a distance from it. In writing about it, you can translate and transform it, until you gain a sense of peace and move on from it.

Poetry is an excellent way of doing this.  Poetry allows us to decode emotions, explaining them to ourselves through its tools of symbolism, metaphor, imagery.  If I can contain an emotion within a poem, then it is stored somewhere else other than my psyche. The power of poetry to translate emotions is incomparable, I think. It is: ‘when an emotion has found its thought, and the thought has found words’ (to quote Robert Frost). I always think of emotions as these vaporous, glowing entities, hard to grasp as they slip and shimmy about us. But poetry helps solidify them, catch them with a net and shine a light on them. What is this thing and how am I experiencing it and what does it have to teach me? Writing a poem is a journey and always at the end of it, there is understanding to be found, which offers the greatest sense of wellbeing. It’s my go-to method of dealing with strong emotions.

Did you know that writing about positive experiences for as little as 15 minutes three times a week can significantly boost feelings of wellbeing and reduce stress and anxiety? You can write a daily diary entry, or a journal topic or perhaps some little scribbled notes of a poem or an idea for a story. Or gratitude journalling – just jotting down three things you are grateful for at the end of every day. Within a year you will have hundreds of little footnotes of joy. Things we may forget completely if they are not immortalised in words. Writing gives power to things. You are creating a world for yourself with words. A better world that will improve your mindset.

Writing is also an exercise in mindfulness. As I type this article I am lulled by the rhythmic tapping of keys and the timbre of thoughts. It is the same when you handwrite something, the pen carries you along in the moment. The blank page quietens the mind. It focuses you on the moment, on each word as it comes. Writing attunes us to the present moment and keeps our minds from wandering.

I really began to think about the wellbeing aspects of writing during Covid. During the lockdown I set up a Facebook group for friends and writers I knew to come together where we could share daily writing as a way of easing the stress of the time. Something quick and easy, like haiku. A haiku is a short three-line nature-based poem, rooted in paying attention to the present moment. From all over the world, members would post in their daily offerings of haiku, usually more than one in the day. We were suddenly, collectively, paying attention to moments of peace and beauty in our lives, despite the strange, unsettling time we were living in, and these little moments became so important to us. They were a comfort, a calm, a nucleus of loveliness. Three little lines of uplifting observation. The group is still going today. We haven’t been able to give it up! Just spending a few minutes in the day to scribble a couple of lines lifts the spirits so much and shifts mood. This is the power of writing.

In 2022-2023 I facilitated a weekly series of Writing for Wellbeing workshops at Foyle New Horizons: Action Mental Health in Derry. I got to meet so many wonderful people there who were so open to the benefits of writing in their wellness journey. I facilitate a lot of writing classes and workshops, but I find Writing for Wellbeing ones really inspiring. I welcome every chance to facilitate them and share the benefits of writing with people and have been lucky to do so in the past few years with groups like Insight Inishowen to promote positive mental health. People tend to open up and share their innermost thoughts and feelings with each other in these workshops which is truly inspiring. All of the creative arts are so beneficial for wellbeing, but writing in particular is quite a powerful one in bringing us face to face with a better understanding of ourselves and of the human condition.

It makes me sad to think that some people may have a resistance to writing because of things like grammar and a feeling that they would not be able for it. There is no right and wrong when it comes to writing. It is not a test. You write what you want to write. What calls your heart. In whatever form it may be. Don’t be put off by things like grammar and rules. Break the rules! Poetry doesn’t have to rhyme! Journal entries don’t have to be pages long! Don’t tell yourself you have nothing to write about. We all have our own stories. Don’t silence them. Writing, unlike some of the other creative arts, costs nothing in terms of material needs. All you need is a pen and paper. You do not need an easel to begin or a set of fancy pens or a predisposed talent. Just begin with scribbles. See where they take you.

Writing will surprise you. That is a guarantee. Every time you put pen to paper, you are led on a journey. You will discover reservoirs of insight and wisdom you didn’t know you had; a lot of writing feels like you are taking ‘dictation’ – listening to some other source, and not writing it yourself. Any writer will tell you this is the best part of writing. Like free-falling. The part when we transcend our blocks and critical hang-ups and tune in to our authentic, wise, and inner selves. And it just flows.  

Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way said that ‘writing is medicine.’ It makes us better. It cures us of our ailments. It is a companion to life’s changes. It is certainly all that. And a welcome addition to the world of wellbeing.

Siobhán’s poems have been published in numerous publications including The Honest Ulsterman, The Ekphrastic Review, Drawn to the Light Press, The Poetry Village and more. She featured on Donegal Daily’s We are the Poets Series 2020 and Eat the Storms, TER and Absolute Writers Podcasts. She volunteers with mental health charity Insight Inishowen.

She blogs at www.a-blog-of-ones-own.blogspot.com and www.a-poem-a-day-project.blogspot.com

WCI-Donegal are always looking for women to share their stories and looking for women to write features on topics of their choice which we will profile as part of our Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices’ series.