Writing as therapy!

I am sending you back in time, on July 10, 2020. It was the awards night, and I was nominated for the Woman of the Year award in ICT, Information, Communication, and Technology. That evening I started having pain in my ear and then in my head, but I didn’t pay attention as I was only thinking about going on stage and speaking. That pain was not just an earache but marked the launch of a new challenge that changed my life 180 degrees. I was diagnosed with a joint disorder, and as a result, I moved to Germany for treatment. This disorder can sometimes affect basic activities like speaking and eating. I started the speech with the nomination to show the lifestyle I had as an entrepreneur and the drastic change that this new health state brought. It shook me to the ground.

But my need to communicate never diminished, not even the need to create. But for me, these are essentially tied together. In these circumstances where I was, I had to change the primary way of communication and not rely on speaking as before. So, I chose to focus on writing.

At first, I wrote words that I couldn’t say when I was sick; then I started writing about how I felt or my opinion about something happening to me. Writing became like a meeting with a therapist, a place where I could express my thoughts, the things that scared me the most, or even just exhalation.

So, the first step was to write down everything that went through my mind without filters. Then the next day, when I read what I had written, helped me to have a conversation with myself in the past and in the future. It helped me to know myself more, to be aware of my thoughts, and consequently, by knowing myself, I could understand why I had these thoughts.

Reading what I wrote made me aware of how I spoke to myself, in a rigorous way, a way that I would never address to any of my friends. I speak to my friends much more gently, especially when a negative event happens to them. So, I decided that at the end of every writing, I would ask myself how I would talk to a friend and write the thought in the version where I treat myself gently.

A crucial thing that I learned through writing is that when my writing was clear, then the thoughts in my mind were clear for sure. Normally, this thing isn’t achieved by writing the first or the second time, but by writing constantly. I often thought that the idea I had in mind was clear. But when I started writing, it was hard and the writing was unclear and had to be rewritten several times for the concept to crystallize. To me, it is true that clear writing means clear thinking and not the other way around. So writing was like fitness for my brain.

I learned a lot from the important events in my life not only by living them but also by writing about them. When writing, I took time to calmly think and analyze what had happened? How was my reaction? In what way other people around me reacted. What I learned from it and how it influenced me.

Writing combined with time travel helped me immensely. You are reading correctly… writing and time travel. For me, a life-changing discovery was that I could go back in time to every event of my life not to change what happened but the meaning it had for me. To change the lesson, I learned from experiences. To be the person who decided what the lesson was.

It helps me with speaking in public. My best thoughts, or most of them, are thoughts I have already written on paper. So, writing serves as the pencil sharpener for my thoughts.

This was the serendipity I found while I was going through this experience. This state of health made me more aware of myself and the people around me, and fundamentally affected my way of living and thinking. Writing sharpened my thoughts, trained my brain, teleported me in time, but above all, it helped me know myself.