What Not Writing For Over A Month Taught Me

It’s been over a month since I have sat down to write something. Beyond your basic email or paragraph, I have not written anything down.

That time and space I’ve taken from writing have allowed me to understand my relationship with writing in a way I had never considered it before. For one thing, I had never truly appreciated writing until I took this impromptu break from it. Writing has not only become a way for me to express myself, but also a way for me to process information, think through new ideas and connect old ones.

You might be thinking that I sound a tad bit dramatic at this point, after all, plenty of people stop writing altogether after high school, aside from the basics. But when writing becomes such an intricate part of how you cope with life, not doing that activity can have a lot of negative impacts on you. Not having writing in my life dramatically impacted my mental health in ways I still don’t quite understand.

My time spent away from writing taught me to not only appreciate writing but use it as a resource and a tool to guide me through life. Without writing, I felt like I was floating and never truly grounded at the moment. A moment would pass, and it was as if it floated away too quickly, I would never get the chance to hold onto it. Writing allows me to process those moments, cherish them and above all, remember them.

There is something so relieving about putting pen to paper or typing your thoughts away on a keyboard that unless you cope with life this way, you may not understand.

This mini-break also made me realize how harsh and critical I was of my writing. I liked my voice and the tone that I used, but if someone didn’t then for some reason their perception of me became my reality. I learned that I put a lot of pressure on myself when I did write and that if I was simply writing a blog post it had to contain all the wisdom of the ages in it – spoiler alert, it doesn’t need to. The posts that I wrote from the heart, that detailed my experiences or even small snippets of lessons I had learned along the way were always the ones that resonated more with people.

I wish I had kept writing since the last time I posted here, but I haven’t. But it still taught me that writing is a part of me. That is not to say I am branding myself as a writer, but I am someone who writes. I am someone who writes to learn, to process, to understand, to think and to connect. Writing is so instrumental in my every day-to-day life, that it baffles my mind how little I used to appreciate it.

So to anyone who has stepped away from something they love for a while, here is your reminder to get back to it. It will make a world of a difference, I promise.