Me, I started writing when I was in grade 6. I had so many troubles at home, that I always needed a way out, always looking for a way to escape the horrible tapestries on my bedroom wall and all the things around it. I wanted to change, yet I wanted to stay inside my comfort zone. My parents got divorced when I was a kid, I hated living in a house where you would listen to screams at 3 a.m. in the morning all the way to 7 a.m. in the beginning, it was just me writing concise sentences at the back of my school notebooks and it gradually turned into getting a spare notebook and keeping it with me at all times.
I later found out that there are things called diaries with beautiful covers that you can use to write in, all your thoughts, complaints about the things you don’t have and whining about the things you do have. I asked my mom, who happens to write in Urdu, to buy me one and she did next month. I started writing anything and everything about my life, my thoughts and my life at school and with the relatives at home in that little diary. I’ve been keeping a journal ever since. I have 15 diaries at the moment, and I just turned 26. I intend to get another one soon.
I’ve been fighting depression for as long as I can remember. I started getting migraines when I was 18 and till now, I feel like half of my productivity and creativity died because of the constant pain and agony. My writing habit is what helped me cope with it. I used to worry about the most trivial of things and now, I feel more in control of my life. I compiled all that I have written in a poetic manner and published my first book by the name ‘Psychaotic’. The reason why I’m telling you this is because it was something that I could call my own, something that made me feel like all my diaries are in the book and I can read and learn through my own experiences. I helped countless people fighting depression and bipolar disorder through that. Maybe you can too. Writing isn’t easy. Sometimes the words flow through you, sometimes, they break your back with pain. But when they do come, you can see what you wrote and you can feel it. You can find it in your heart that you need to forgive yourself and know that whatever happened isn’t your fault. The World works in strange ways. You just need to be able to understand and see where it takes you.
Today, when I write, after all that time, I feel a tingle in my hands that tells me that I need to take out my journal and my black pen. I write, for myself and for the people who will read it ages later and I pray and I hope that it makes them feel better. Somehow, someday. If you are fighting depression, I assure you that keeping a journal will make you feel better. You will be able to look at what you’ve been through and make yourself stronger and better. You’ll be able to fight distress and anxiety. I bet those panic and anxiety attacks keep you up at night. That’s okay. I have them too. More often than you think. But my writing habit helps, it really does. You should get a diary too, write the littlest of things that bother you and cram them up in your writing. You’ll feel the difference in your mood, your anxiety and your depression after that.
There is no keeping it inside. You have to channelize it. Best thing is to pour it out on paper. It will change your life, as it changed mine.
