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A very kind person, who obviously reads my blog, sent me a book in the post anonymously.  It was the book I was drawn to on the shelf a month ago, but didn’t buy.  It was the book that reminded me to keep writing, keep blogging no matter how hard it got.

 

And today I read the introduction.  And on a day that I was finding it hard to think, let alone write, it refreshed that memory on me how important it is for me to keep putting my pen to paper, my fingers to my key board.

 

Psychologist James W. Pennebaker found in his research that:  ‘Writing about significant emotional experiences provides the same benefits as talking therapies.  Better yet, writing for several consecutive days for fifteen to thirty minutes per session resulted in a decreased in intrusive thoughts, a reduction of heightened emotions and an improvement in physical and immune functioning, to name a few.  Put simply:  developing a writing practice can not only be cathartic and therapeutic, it has long-term benefits as well.’

 

I am so grateful for the book.

 

And even more so on the day it arrived, the day my head is so full that my usual methods of reprogramming the negative, the painful, the unhelpful and the damaging just didn’t work.  Instead my brain ran like an overworked computer … and crashed with the final words flashing across it ‘do not compute!’.

 

So I took this little book and I let all the words fly in scribble accross the pages that said ‘write it down’.

 

And on the page opposite that said ‘let it go’, the page for the solutions and ideas… I wrote ‘Keep writing’.

 

And I felt a little sense of calm creep back in.

 

Thank you to whoever sent me this lifeline.  x