Everybody goes through rough patches - days when it’s a chore to crack a smile, when mustering laughter seems an ocean away. And sometimes the things that are pulling us down are unexplainable - even though it’s sunny out, we feel turbulent inside. 

 

Mental health is about more than battling mental illnesses. Mental health is about every individual’s own path to wellness, and what we as a community can do to support well-being. It’s rather like a math problem with billions of solutions, the puzzle being how we can put those solutions together to achieve progress and happiness in our lives. 

 

For me, one of those solutions is writing. On a bad day, or a great one, writing gives me the opportunity to splash all my thoughts and emotions into one space. I let it all flow onto the page, the big white whales, the tiniest gnats and annoyances, the quirky beauty and most miniscule joys all together, their own imagined universe. 

 

Then I sit back and read. And organize my thoughts and develop philosophies as to how to approach my struggles and inch my way towards dreams. Sometimes my writings feel like poems about a single subject that has devoured my week. Sometimes they manifest as prose that reads like a stream of consciousness, hopping stone to stone across a labyrinth of rivers. And I’ve discovered underlying motivations in my life, theories to live by, and once they stop working, newer, more precise ones to replace them.

 

Writing is a fulfillingly constructive act. It’s an incredibly grounding pursuit, one which engages me in understanding myself. It’s a chance to enjoy one’s own company and truly press the bounds of one’s conceptions. It’s also tangible, and is an incredibly valuable chronicle of life - and the more I let myself express, the more useful and meaningful it is to return to. I’ve read writings from yesterday, from last month, from five years ago, and rediscovered things that interest me, ideas in their inception, ways of approaching quandaries that had immersed 

themselves in obscurity. Writing catalogues patterns in my life, and thereby inspires me to break those patterns which I dislike, or feed the passions that fuel me.

 

And I improve all the while, in both emotional well-being and skill. Writing isn’t like bowling, where my first game is my best. I don’t find myself plateauing, because it offers a universe of material (and many more that have yet to be imagined). Writing is infinite, and can do infinite good.

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Featured in the Mental Health Association for Cortland County Newsletter