Use Writing to Help Overcome Depression

After my father died, I tried to talk my mom into taking up writing for a hobby. I had written articles for magazines for a number of years and told her that maybe she could pick up a little extra money as well as having something to keep her mind occupied if she took up writing.

She didn't act too interested so I forgot about it until my next visit two weeks later. "I decided to give writing a try," she said. "Do you want to see the book I am writing?"

Book? I hadn't imagined she would try anything as involved as a book, but I was glad she had found something to fill her time with. A few minutes later, she came out of her room with an armload of papers containing the first 15 chapters of her romance novel.

I was stunned. My mother hadn't even finished high school, had never shown the slightest interest in writing, didn't even read romance novels, and here she had written 15 chapters of a romance novel of her own. And in just 2 weeks. I couldn't believe it. Especially since she had typed the whole thing on an ancient Underwood typewriter with an extremely faded ribbon.

I sat down and started reading.

You probably think I'm going to say that the book was finished and on its way to becoming a best seller by the next time I visited. But, no, the book wasn't that good. I think she may have been reading a few romance novels on the side because she seemed to have the form down pretty good, and her writing was as good if not better than a lot of novels I have run across, but she wasn't interested in publishing it. She didn't want people to know she had written those "steamy" as she called them, love scenes. Actually, they were pretty tame, but I couldn't change her mind.

No. Now that she had proved she could write, she was going to write articles like I did. At the time, the most I had ever received for an article was $40 and I hadn't duplicated that amount since then. Oh well, I thought. Once she finds out how difficult it is, she'll give up, and at least it will give her something to do in the meantime. I did buy her a couple of new ribbons for the typewriter.

Writing is wonderful therapy. If you have suffered a loss similar to the one my mother suffered, give writing a try. The neat thing about writing is that you get to choose the subject---most of the time, anyway. If you are in the mood to write a children's story, then write a children's story, or maybe you have what it takes to write that "Great American Novel" everyone is always talking about.

Lots of people overcome the stress and depression in their lives by starting a journal and writing something in it each day. I keep an online journal which is more like my daily prayers than a real journal, and I can't express how much it helps to just pour out my feelings on paper or, as in my case, on a blank word processor document for a few minutes. And it probably makes your family happier, too, not to have to listen to you whining and complaining so much.

You may be wondering what ever happened to my mother's writing career. Well, she actually wrote an article about her cat and sold it to Cat Magazine for $50. Her first sale and she was already getting more per article than I did. Believe me, that was hard to swallow. After all, I had a cat, too, and even though I had written and submitted several articles about her, to the very same magazine, not one had been accepted.

After that, my mother wrote an article about riding to the coast on the train when she was a child and sold it to Oregon Coast Magazine, a glossy publication that had also rejected one of my articles.

Then she discovered Good Old Times magazine and sold several articles to them, all this after she was 80. One day when I asked her what her current project was, she surprised me by saying, "I'm done writing. It kept my mind off your dad for a while, but I have other things that need doing now." And she continued to do them for another 12 years.

I have to say that my mother's short-lived writing career spurred me into getting more serious about my own, and today, I still recommend writing as a great way to relieve stress and depression.

Jeanne Gibson writes from her home in Springfield, OR. Find out more about how to use writing to overcome depression in her blog post on the subject at: http://sowingseedsthatmatter.blogspot.com/2010/07/could-writing-help-you-overcome.html