Writing isn't therapy
But we keep coming back despite the mess
In the summer of 1929, Ernest Hemingway sat in a rented room in Paris and rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms forty-seven times.
Forty-seven drafts until the right one found itself.
The novel itself had taken two years to write. It had pulled from the rawest material of his life: the war he’d fought in, the nurse he’d fallen in love with in a Milan hospital, the child they lost, the grief that followed him across the Atlantic like a debt he couldn’t outrun. He had already written the whole thing. It existed. It was, by any reasonable measure, done.
And still he went back to the ending. Thirty-nine times.
A journalist, apparently unable to help himself, eventually asked why.
Hemingway looked at him and said: getting the words right.
He didn’t say he was blocked. He didn’t say he needed to get the story right. It wasn’t getting the emotion right or the arc right or the thing I’m trying to say right. It was the words. Specifically, the words. As though the words were not the vehicle for the truth but the place where the truth lived, the place where the truth could be discovered. Where the real ending was hiding. As though the only way to find out what he actually knew about loss and love and the soft cruelty of surviving an ordinary life was to keep returning to the sentence until the sentence told him.
This is what writing does, when you let it. It’s something that so many of history’s greatest writers describe as being almost accidental. You just have to get out of its way.
Because the writing will tell you.
It won’t necessarily clarify or confirm what you already know. But it will, when you let it, reveal what you didn’t know you knew.
I’ve always found it curious when people say writing is therapy.
As if stringing words together on a page is somehow equivalent to sitting across from someone who spent seven years and a small fortune learning how to untangle the human psyche. As if the journal and the consulting room are the same room, just with different furniture.
Therapy is therapy.
Writing is something else entirely. Something equally as powerful, but a lil more risky, and significantly less likely to end with someone handing you a tissue and asking how that made you feel.
Therapy, by design, is a structured process. It has goals, frameworks, carefully cultivated safety. There’s someone across from you nodding at appropriate moments, redirecting when you spiral, making sure you don’t get completely lost in the labyrinth of your own mind.
Writing doesn’t give a shit about your structure.
Writing is that friend who sits silently while you ramble for three hours, lets you cry until your mascara is halfway down your face, watches you arrive at the thing you were actually trying to say from the very beginning and simply says, you make sense. Nothing else. Just that.
Maybe that’s why it feels like therapy.
Because when you sit down to write, not for an audience, not for applause, not for the engagement metrics, but just to face yourself, you can’t hide. There’s nowhere to run. The page is patient and it is relentless. It will wait. It will wait until you’ve exhausted all your practised lines and polished narratives and performed certainties and finally, finally write something true.
That’s the part that saved me. The reckoning.
And the reckoning is the reason we always come back, despite the mess, despite the chaos, despite the exhilarating, infuriating nature of trying to capture something in words that do it justice. It doesn’t always feel good, but I always look forward to it (kind of like the gym, I know the payoff happens later). Half the time it feels like being gently mugged by my own subconscious. But nothing else does, for me, what writing does. There’s just something about the journal, the pen, the notes app at 2 am.
There’s a myth about writing that gets repeated so often it has started to feel like fact: writing clarifies thinking. If you just put your thoughts into words, the fog lifts. The path emerges. You have your aha moment, courtesy of the blank page.
Absolute bollocks.
Sometimes writing makes everything murkier. Sometimes it peels back layers you weren’t ready to confront. Sometimes it shows you exactly who you are when all you wanted was to figure out how to write a better email.
AND IT SHOULD.
I can’t count how many times I’ve sat down with a clear idea, only to watch it dissolve into complexity the moment I tried to capture it in words. Or how often I’ve started writing about one thing and ended up somewhere so completely different I barely recognise the journey. Writing doesn’t simplify. It complicates. It doesn’t always offer resolution. Sometimes it just gives you better questions. It makes you a better, more critical thinker.
Which, in the world we currently live in, is useful but makes life fucking hard sometimes. When you realise you swallowed propaganda for breakfast for about your whole entire life, and you have to begin reconstructing who you are.
To quote Daisy:
“I hope she’s a fool. That’s the best thing a girl in this world can be, a beautiful little fool”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Ignorance was bliss, is what I’m saying. But we’re too far gone for that now.
The most valuable writing I have ever done has been the drafts no one will ever see. The journals full of messy, unfiltered thinking. The documents with names like wtf am I even doing.doc that I open when I’m questioning everything, which is more often than I’d like to admit and probably less often than I should.
Because writing isn’t a vehicle for self-improvement. It’s not a productivity tool or a branding exercise or a route to enlightenment. It doesn’t make you clean or deft or morally superior. It is a conversation with the parts of yourself that don’t get airtime in the loud, curated theatre of daily life.
This is where most of my clients end up, at some point in our work together. There’s always this moment where I’ve had them writing in ways they never have before, and they hit the hard part. When what was supposed to feel like liberation and transcendence starts to feel hard, crunchy, weird, deep. Like being stuck in a room with themselves for slightly longer than is comfortable.
They’ll say: fuck. I’ve written so much and almost said nothing. Some of it seems right. The rest reads like shit.
And I’ll say: fucking great. That means you’re doing it.
Nobody warns you about this part, by the way. The brochure for “start a writing practice” is all romance and morning pages and journalling and “finding your voice”. It does not mention the bit where you sit at your desk and realise how very little you actually know about anything and leaves you feeling like you’d be better off never saying anything ever again.
Consistent writing, slowly over time teaches you who you are:
The words you overuse because they feel safe. The topics you skirt because they’re too tender. The opinions you dilute because you’re afraid of being too much. The phrases you hide behind when you’re not quite ready to say the thing you actually mean.
It’s like developing a sixth sense for your own bullshit. Which can feel really fucking annoying, especially at first. You can feel when you’re skating on the surface. You can feel when you’re repeating someone else’s thoughts in your own voice. You can feel when you’re writing what you think you should say instead of what’s actually true for you.
And once you notice it, you can’t un-notice it.
This is where writing diverges from therapy most sharply. In therapy, someone else holds the mirror. In writing, you have to be both: the one looking and the reflection looking back. You have to notice your own patterns, question your own assumptions, challenge your own avoidance tactics. Take the self-understanding and then turn it into creative expression. Do something with it.
There is no certification for this. No qualification that prepares you for it. There’s no “right” way to do it. There’s no completing it. Just the willingness to keep showing up, keep writing, keep facing whatever comes out on the page.
But you can’t stay in the mirror forever. And I’m serious about this.
I have two writing practices and I’m brutal about both. One is for me: unfiltered, unedited, not for anyone’s eyes, the place where I go to find out what I think. The other is for expression. For turning what I find into something that reaches outward, that does something in the world rather than just in my own head.
Writing that only ever turns inward becomes its own kind of cage. At some point you have to bring it back out. But only writing what you think other people want to read is a cage, too. So sometimes you have to write for you, sometimes you have to let someone see. And sometimes, frequently actually, you have to unplug from the mirror altogether.
That’s art.
Art lives at the intersection of what you know and what you’re still figuring out. Art invites others to sit in their own messy truths because you were brave enough to sit in yours first. So, it’s not therapy.
But isn’t that the whole fucking point?
It is a reckoning. On your own terms, in your own time, at whatever hour the words decide to come. A confrontation with the gap between the person you feel you need to be and the person you actually are. A place where the forty-seventh draft is sometimes the one that finally gets the words right, because you kept returning to the sentence until the sentence told you what you knew.
Writing won’t fix you. Lol. Any of my writer friends reading this are laughing right about now. It won’t heal all your wounds or resolve all your questions or magically transform you into the person you wish you were.
But it will show you who you are. Right now. In this moment. With all the contradictions and the brilliance and the bullshit.
And when we’re constantly being told who to be, what to want, how to present ourselves for maximum approval, a true mirror might be exactly what we need most, sometimes.
Your writing practice:
Write a letter to yourself from five years ago.
Just tell the truth.
Tell them what it actually felt like. What you were actually afraid of. What you kept getting wrong and how it felt in the body before you understood why. Tell them what you figured out and what you’re wrestling with next.
If this piece felt like a cosy chat around the fire, you’d like to have more. You can do that two ways with me in the near future, one virtually and one actually, in real life:
Writing The Future is a free, live writing practice and workshop experience with my Creative Living co-founder and me, Maia Benaim, on March 17th at 12pm EST. Three hours to create the conditions where your best ideas can find you. Just writing, together, and finding out what your voice does when you stop managing it. We’re at 700 creatives registered from all over the world. Come join us.
And if you want the version of this that lasts a week, in the Costa Rican rainforest, with mountains and rivers and coffee going cold because the paragraph was working:
Writing Wildly — five days at the base of the Turrialba volcano, whitewater rafting, bathing in waterfalls and writing in one of the most peaceful places on earth, to remember what you actually want to say. June 21–26 has 4 spots left. September 20–25 has 5.
The smoking area. The side quest. The place where you sit on an upturned crate next to someone you’ll probably never see again and tell them your entire life story.
That’s what this space is. A reprieve from the constant performance. A place for the conversations you actually want to have, with people who aren’t afraid to tell the truth, write the damn thing, and let their ideas breathe.
You’ll find a writing practice or prompt inside every article because consumption is one thing but art happens in expression.
thank you so much for this article.
There are so many nuggets I added to my notes app labeled “remember”. Incredible piece as always.