I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

People ask me sometimes if writing is like therapy for me.

They want to know if writing about the most difficult times of my life was therapeutic.

They want to know if it healed me, or at least helped me feel better.

I think I understand why this line of questioning is so common, or there's an impulse behind it that I think I've come to understand.

Many of my dearest friends are grappling with big things right now, the end of a long-term relationship,

or the declining health of someone they love, or a diagnosis that caught them off guard.

Everyone I know is grappling with something big, honestly. They're all trying to find ways to cope. No wonder we want to know what coping

strategies work for other people. By asking if writing is therapy for me, I think what people

are really asking is, will this help me?

I'm pretty frank with people when I answer this question.

No, I don't think of writing as therapy.

For me, therapy is therapy.

And when I'm not actively in therapy, I have other ways to calm my mind.

Meditation, walks in the woods, running, listening to music.

Writing doesn't calm my mind. It does the opposite. It wakes me up.

Writing about an experience helps me enter it more fully and think more deeply into it, and neither feels particularly therapeutic. When I write, my goal isn't to heal

from an experience, it's to articulate it, to myself first, and then to others.

Articulating an experience helps me see it more clearly, helps me understand it.

Sometimes that feels like the opposite of healing.

It's an opening or a reopening.

Writing opens me up to the stuff of life.

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