Trigger warning- mentions of trauma, PTSD, Autism, nervous breakdown. Daily writing? That is a much debated topic in the writing community. I don't have a firm daily writing practice. Of course that is now and I have had the experience of writing every day in the past. From my youngest years, as soon as I knew how to read and write a sentence, books were a lifeline in a horrifically painful life. Writing for me became as necessary as breathing; if I wasn't writing, I was reading with the mind to writing. I wanted to see someone who was me or like me but I wasn't even sure who I was. All I knew was that I was other. As an AFAB person- assigned female at birth - I've struggled against sexist bias in ways that caused considerable extra harm. I was not diagnosed with autism as a child and give an extra help because I did not fit the classical type of autism that is based on cisgender males. I spent the first 36 years of my life sensing that I was different without having much of an explanation why or how. This is common for AFAB autistic people. Alongside my journey to self-diagnosis as an autistic person - in the US where I live it is expensive and unnecessarily complicated to get officially diagnosed and so the community accepts self-diagnosis such as mine - but that aside I have gone through a frighteningly typical struggle to get properly diagnosed for my issues in addition to being autistic. Not specifically directly related to my daily or not writing practice, but I have managed quite a few diagnoses in my 43 years. So all of that trauma and lack of support for who I am - I mean let's not ignore the fact that I'm also very clear in my sexual orientation and gender identity - lead to what is colloquially called a nervous breakdown in 2018. Now a psychiatric nurse friend has explained to me that the correct term is actually decompensation. Regardless of how much was decompensation or autistic burnout, I barely made it to getting mental health help and staying out of a psychiatric hospital. Well I have had. In my life before 2018 but I would have called a nervous breakdown, I still tend to think especially with my writing of “before nervous breakdown” and "after nervous breakdown." Writing still feels as important as breathing to me, but I don't feel quite the urgency to write every day. I would hypothesize that that is because of therapy with an awesome therapist, I am not working as hard to escape anymore. I do regularly go through. Of wishing that I wrote as much as I did before my nervous breakdown and that has led to things like reading "The INFJ Writer." I loved Lauren Sapala's book- in the way of a book made to argue with and debate things. Well I did skip plenty of her writing exercises, I do keep a portion of one that is become the closest to daily writing as I have after my nervous breakdown - in a journal I keep on Google docs so it it's accessible on my phone or my computer, I might say a few sentences or even a paragraph before I list five gratitudes in relationship to my writing life and then gratitudes in general. I’ve a handful of other post ideas- they’ll happen eventually.
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