Episode 229: Writing as Healing
This is Episode Number 229 of Live Free Creative podcast, Writing as Healing. This topic has come up so often in the last few months for me. I wanted to spend some time to just talk it through, not only with you listener, who I love sharing ideas and thoughts and inspiration with.
Also, I figured for this one, I would call in a friend who I consider a writing mentor. One of my favorite creative companions, who I’ve known for a long time and whose work in the world feels meaningful to me. I’m excited to share her with you today.
In a few minutes, I’ll introduce you to my good friend Kim Christenson of Talk Wordy To Me and the conversation that we shared around this topic of writing as healing and what that looks like in her life, in my life, and what it could possibly look like in yours.
Segment: Peaks of the Week for Creative Writing
As an appropriate accessory to today’s episode, I thought that I would do a segment called Peaks of the Week and share some of my favorite creative writing tools.
This is a fun combination list. Kim sent over a list of some of her favorite writing tools, books, and journals as well. So, between the two of us, we’ve compiled a great little set of places to get started, either reading or writing. Or reading about writing as you explore.
So, number one that was on both of our lists is the book Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. This is what feels like a quintessential creativity book by now. It came out, I’m going to say about eight years ago. I probably could look it up, but I’m, I don’t have it in front of me right now. I remember picking it up in the store and sitting in the parking lot, reading it front to back in one sitting, just feeling so validated in some ways, so inspired in others. It’s a beautiful invitation to step into your own creativity. So that is Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert.
Another book that you may consider that is both a book and a writing practice is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It’s also a process, an invitation into a multi-week program of exploring your creativity, of diving into who you are. What is your voice? What do you think of, how do you put things together, and allowing yourself space to just really explore that.
The third book we both recommend is called Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. Anne Lamott is such an incredible writer. She’s a memoirist, and in this book, she’s giving tips for writing, but not in a pragmatic sort of, this is how you do it way it’s an opening into her process, into thoughts around it, and suggestions forgetting to know yourself a little bit better. I always love in Anne Lamott’s work, the acknowledgement of the messiness of life and of the non-linear qualities of so many of the experiences that we have. And Bird by Bird is a great exploration of some of that.
A recommendation that comes straight from Kim is a book called Writing for Bliss, A Seven Step Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming Your Life by Diana Rob. I have not read this book. I’m excited to put it on my list and to dive in. It sounds very practical and there’s something beautiful about the practicality of being able to follow the steps and especially if you are new to writing or new to creativity and you’re feeling a little bit like I don’t know where to begin. Having a seven-step plan sounds great.
Kim also recommended the Self-Love Journal by Promptly journals. I love the self-love journal that they offer. I also want to recommend their gratitude journal. This is the one that I’m currently working through this year with undated prompts about things that you’re grateful for, things that you appreciate, and then some note pages in between those prompts to be able to fill out a little bit more. I really love not having the overwhelm of just, hundreds of blank pages in front of me, but having a small prompt, a couple lines where I can just feel like whatever two sentences, I must write down are sufficient for the day, and then to be able to return to it whenever feels right.
And the final peak of the week I want to add is a new book that I just found when I was wandering in a bookstore the last month. It’s called Healing Through Words by Rupi Kaur. And it is, A guided journal with these beautiful reflections and the illustrations are incredible and it’s interspersed with poetry. I found it delightful and a beautiful, meaningful book that you could even just keep on your bedside table to open you up to writing thoughts, experiences, ideas as you begin or end your days.
The links to all these peaks of the week for creative writing and digging into writing and reading and creativity in general will be in the show notes.
Interview with Kim Christenson
I am excited to introduce you now to my friend and special guest, Kim Christensen. We go back a long time, and we share a little bit about how we got to know each other in the beginning of the interview. Kim is a lifelong reader and writer. She shares her best book recommendations and writing encouragement on Instagram at Talk Wordy To Me.
I will make sure that’s linked in the show notes so you can follow along with her there. She’s a book reviewer for Good Things Utah, and a student in Leslie University’s Master of Creative Writing Program. Not only is Kim a writer herself, but she has also helped thousands of other people discovered the joy of writing.
She created eleven journals with Promptly journals before she and her co-owner sold the company in 2021. She’s currently working on her third novel and running an online course called Write for Life Academy. It’s an online writing course for kids, and she’ll tell you more about that in our interview. Kim lives in Utah with her husband, three kids and two adorable bunnies that often show up on Instagram. So, if you follow her at Talk Wordy To Me, you will get to know them as well. I’m thrilled to be able to share Kim with you and this conversation today.
M: Kim. I’m so happy to have you here on the podcast. How are ya?
K: It’s fun to be here. I’m doing well. How are you?
M: Good. I am doing great, and I am so excited. I love talking to you anyway. We’ve been friends for a long time and a few weeks ago I was thinking about upcoming episodes and just things that I wanted to share with this, with my audience and my community and things that felt impactful and practical and meaningful.
And I kept circling around the idea of writing. Writing has always been a part of my life. I have shared that I, have been a journaler since I was very young. And then I was a blogger for a long time, and of course I wrote a book and now I’m back in the thick of it in this graduate program where I feel like I’m doing much more actual, sitting at the computer, typing words that need to be like communicating something important than I have in a few years.
Like it’s been great and intense. And, with that, I feel like a different part of me opening through the process of really having to formulate thoughts and reflections and ideas into words and communicate like as clearly as possible. It’s been transformative and interesting because it’s like through a backdoor perspective that I didn’t expect.
I’m not studying writing; it just happens to be part of what I’m doing. I thought, you know what I need to do. I need to invite Kim to come chat because you are who I think of when I think of writing, not only from a really talented perspective of I love your creative writing and I’ve loved experiencing you as a writer also, because I know that writing is not only creative expression for you, that it’s also been a tool that you’ve implemented in lots of different ways.
So, I’m excited to have you here and share some of this with my audience. And I just wanted to start with having you introduce yourself, a little bit about your background and how writing came to be at the center of who you are.
K: Yeah, so this is what I love to talk to people about. So, I’m giddy to be able to dive in, especially with you because you’re such a good conversationalist and we share that love and I guess respect for writing as a tool that can really help us personally as well as connect us to others.
For me, it started as soon as I can remember. My mom, I was just talking to her today actually, and she said, you have been writing since as soon as you could hold a pencil in your hand.
And she said you would just stay up late at night in your room after I put you to bed. You’d have your little light on, and you would just be first drawing and then forming words, fake words, the best I could. And then finally when I could read and write, I would just write and write. And I was given my first journal, my mom gave me my first journal when she was remarried.
So, my parents were divorced when I was little, three years old. And then when I was five, I got a new step and four stepsiblings, and I already had. five siblings. And so, I was opposed to the whole idea.
You were a little five-year-old saying, mom, I’ve got better plans for you.
Yes. This is not what I ordered.
And so, I had a really hard time as a highly sensitive person who from a young age just felt everything deeply, and. So, she in her wisdom, gave me this journal, which I still have, and it’s, a vintage eighties journal.
M: Did it have a lock on it? A little tiny lock?
K: It didn’t. I have some of those. I love those. Those are the best. My kids have those, and they love ’em. But this one I, my, at first, as I couldn’t quiet, I would talk faster than I could write. So, my mom would ask me questions and she would write for me. She would just let me talk and she would write for me. And then as soon I was able to pick up on it myself.
But right away I recognized this expressive writing as a place where I could fully and safely express myself. And someone would listen first, my mom, and then I just, even just when it was me and my journal, I felt witnessed in a way that was important for me at such. A transitional time in my little life.
Yeah. And that process has stayed with me since, and I’ve just always expressed myself that way. I feel like it’s part of my body, and it’s just, when I went into second grade, I had a teacher who really called out what she called a gift for creative writing in me, which I don’t know if it was much different from other kids, but the fact that she called it out in me and encouraged it is what has stayed with me since.
Since second grade when she said, you’re an amazing writer. You have a gift. Even when I left second grade and moved on, she gave me a notebook and said, keep writing stories and bring them to me and I’ll read them. What a wonderful teacher.
M: Wow. Yeah. What a fantastic mentor.
K: Yeah. So, from that impressionable age, I gained this seed of confidence in myself as a writer and that there was value to my voice as expressed through my writing. And so, I really, I credit her and my mom for giving me that gift and showing me the way, and ever since then, it’s just been a huge part of me
life. That’s so interesting. I, one thing that you said that really stood out to me, you used the word witness, that writing became. a place where you felt there was a witness of you and your experience.
M: I think this is the touching a vein for me because I am, in addition to doing so much writing, I’ve also been doing a lot of reading. And I’m continually struck by whose voices I am introduced to, who are the authorities in the field and in history. And there’s a lot of political things that play into this that are a little bit interesting as well that I feel like, gosh, why is every authority in every field seem to be a man.
I keep trying to dig for like, where are the historic women in my field? What were they saying? And when you, when I find when it feels like I found a little hidden treasure that someone. That they wrote down these words. And I think of that, of course, like spiritually, that’s significant for me too.
That, and we’ve talked about this as friends, just gosh, where are the women in the scriptures? Where are the women in, historical civilization, documents? Where are the women philosophers? Where are the women’s voices? And writing is a place that you can hear your own voice, that you can be witnessed.
And I think a lot of us at times go through seasons where we feel like, does anything that I do even matter? Because it feels like sometimes acting into the void, day after day of mundane tasks and caregiving and loving and feeling like it’s meaningful. But also like for what?
That word witness just felt impactful for me.
So how did you go on a bridge from being a young writer and called out and recognized as someone with a talent for creative writing and a passion for it in elementary school to becoming a writing professional and eventually owning a company involved with writing and then now going on and studying creative writing years and years later?
What does the in between stage look like?
K: Yeah, so in, in high school, so I went to high school in Australia, and over there they had extension English or English extension they called it. And it’s basically the equivalent of AP English. And I got into that class because I knew it was where, a place where I could shine.
Math was not., I will choose that class. Yes. I was the girl who got ass A pluses, teachers, pet extra credit in English and then Ds, sometimes Fs, often Cs in math. That’s okay., oh it was. But so, I did that in high school and then in college I chose English as my degree. And while I was there, I also was interested in broadcast journalism and print journalism.
So, I worked as a print journalist and broadcast journalist on campus. And then once I graduated, I worked at a publishing company and then as associate editor at a magazine, which. Still, I call my dream job just because it was so fun to do lifestyle
articles.
M: I was going to say that feels like a sitcom job to me in the best way. Like you can see yourself, like the music playing in the background as you get ready to walk to the office.
K: Oh my gosh. It’s funny you say that because they literally filmed a Hallmark movie, a not exactly Hallmark, but that vein of movie Yes. At the office. And I got to be at it as an extra, and I was like, oh yeah.
It’s like the perfect little, a magazine editor job and I love it. We’re yes, so fun. Dream job. And then once I started having babies, it was nice that I had this writing career kind of kickstarted because I could still do it from home. And I was a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines and websites and then, blogging came along, and I started a blog with everyone else and wrote that way.
And then. Yeah. And then I started, I was freelancing and then I wanted to share more of my own opinion pieces. And so, I, that’s why I created my blog and my website talk wordy to me is so that I could go off on whatever tangent I wanted to, and not just my assigned news stories or whatever, and I could remove some of those filters and just share what I wanted to share so that landed me there.
And then, a friend reached out, a former roommate to talk to me about an idea she had, and I was feeling like my life was full at the time and was ready to say no to whatever she was going to offer. Thank you. No, thank you. Yeah, I was ready to do that. But then she said, hey, I’ve been writing in a notebook back and forth, like journaling with my little daughter, her five-year-old at the time, and she said, it’s been miraculous the things that my daughter has opened about through writing that she never would’ve opened about verbally.
And she’s I want to make it into a product, into a journal. And then I was like, yep, I’m in. So, we created Loom Journals, a parent-child journal on Kickstarter Kim and me, and then our friend Tasha, and then that went well and was successful. And so, then my husband and I. Took the company and ran with it for a year and created a couple’s journal.
And then we were, I was Aqua hired by promptly journals. I connected with this local company promptly and Jane, the c e o of that. We had a lot in common and we were in a similar space and so we thought let’s just joined forces and worked together. So, we merged our companies and we recently about a year ago, sold the company.
But that was an incredible venture to be able to do what I love and I’m authentically passionate about, journaling and making it more accessible for people to be able to do that as my job was really fulfilling and absolutely challenging in a lot of ways too. But yeah, I’m just, I’m happy I was able to have that experience.
M: It’s probably an interesting echo of, having your friend call and say, I have a five-year-old who I’ve been journaling with, and it’s really opened our relationship. Did that just feel like a deja vu of you as little five-year-old Kim and your mom sitting down with you and helping you use this tool of writing to open about the experiences that you were going through?
K: Yeah, definitely. And when you put it that way, I don’t know if I like fully connected all those dots at the time, but now thinking about it, absolutely. It did and it reconnected with something in me and something that I wanted to share with other people, and I want every little five-year-old to be able to have that gift of recognizing the power and value of their voice.
M: For sure. You have writing as part of you as a passion and something that you, that feels like an innate skill and interest. And then there’s this other utilitarian piece of it, writing as a tool towards an end that isn’t writing itself. So, I think of creative writing often as something that we’re doing for the process, that it opens your mind and you’re connecting new things.
And the story often when you start, especially feels secondary to the process of being creative. How do you think that they’re different, or d do they feel like different things to you? Creative writing and maybe process writing versus using writing specifically to call out. I want to build connection with my partner or with my child. And do they look differently? How are those applied differently?
K: Yes, great question. I do think of it as separate entities in some ways. So, I do. Label the partner journaling, the personal writing, journaling, I call that journaling. If it’s for yourself, if it’s not for an audience, I call it journaling.
Even if it’s just with a spouse or partner or child, I call all that journaling. If it’s not, if the goal isn’t to publish it or have someone else see it, who you’re not writing with, if that makes sense., so I call all of that like self-expression, writing, journaling, and then. But it is interesting because the line does start to blur, especially for me.
Right now, I’m getting my master’s in creative writing and I’m writing my third novel. And this novel has more of me in it than anything I’ve written before. And it’s terrifying and exhausting. And exciting. But it does. And I’m also taking a personal essay class, which is, true stories about myself, right?
And so, it’s so interesting. I literally have been copying and pasting segments of my personal a hundred percent true essays. into my fiction. Don’t tell anyone. I’m like, we’re here telling everyone.
You’ll never know. You’ll never know which parts are copied and pasted if it gets published. But yeah, so it’s, the line is blurring for me between that creative work and that personal journaling work. And they lend to each other because for me, I started noticing even more the power and medicine of writing as I read both fiction and non-fiction.
I noticed this is therapeutic for me to be reading about these experiences. And I know it is for the author, like you put yourselves in their shoes. Yeah. And like whether it’s fiction or sometimes especially fiction, you’re able to go deeper because there’s less blocks and you have more freedom.
And so, I’ve. I just looked at the ways the authors put themselves into their writing in that way. So yeah, they’re distinct, but they’re blended too.
M: Yeah, it’s interesting noting that I often think of nonfiction as scientific, but that’s not always, like non-fiction is spans the spectrum of memoir, which is journaling for an audience to research, to like textbooks, versus fiction where you’re harnessing the power of story and relating to everyday experiences, often, or even if not the experiences because for example, in sci-fi these are entirely coming from someone’s imagination, and yet the stories touch on human emotion and human experience in a way that we’re able to open to and learn things through fiction in a way that sometimes we can’t connect to with non-fiction.
I’m in the middle of a section in school on empathy theory of mind and social norms, and the idea of like, how do we learn and expand our viewpoints to encompass understanding and sometimes even feeling and stepping into the shoes of other people. And so much of the research revolves around being exposed to stories, especially fiction because your guard is down.
You’re not feeling like you’re reading something, that someone is trying to teach you something. It’s like the back door into learning and understanding that someone has written. about the human experience without trying to shove it down your throat. And so, you are surprised by the way your heart and mind open to that.
What do you’re in the middle of this process right now, writing fiction, but with truth and stories that have changed you and that, I think the hope is that they become relatable and integrated into the reader’s lives at some point as well.
What is that process like? Imagining how you want someone to feel based on how you feel, or do you even go there? Do you just think, this is what this means to me and whoever reads it will receive it however it fits best for their life?
K: I think there’s a little bit of both and I, what I’ve learned. Writing a couple books before and getting feedback and working on those and now working with a mentor who, who writes both memoir and fiction, that’s been helpful for me to have her guide to me because of those things that you said and how I can approach this. What I’ve noticed about the process so far in writing this novel is I am in some ways trying less hard.
It’s less contrived because it’s true, it’s closer to the truth, and I’m capturing truer emotion. And while it feels very specific to me in a lot of ways, and I’ve had moments where I’m like, is there, are people going to resonate with this? It’s so deep for me., but it, I do think that.
When we tap into those authentic emotions and experiences it’s paradoxical because those are the ones that people resonate with the most because, like you said, talking about fiction and non-fiction, I think when we, in fiction, if we, fully take ourselves out of it and just try to write and hit these certain plot points or these requirements of a romance novel, for example, which is the process of the last novel I wrote was like, okay, I’m now going to try to write for the market. I’m going to hit all the checkpoints of what that kind of novel entails and requires, and that works and sells in some ways, but it didn’t feel quite as authentic to me as I wanted it to.
And so I think it can be done, but at the end of the day, I write to connect and I want to connect with people, and I want to connect with myself, and I want it to feel brave and real and deeper than just, love a good Hallmark movie, but deeper than that, , and so that’s all I’m trying to do here, is just trying to be really honest and see where it takes me and see where it takes readers, and so far, so good. So far, it’s good to hear the feedback from my professor on the parts where I’m like, I don’t know how this will land, but it’s true.
This is how I feel or how I felt, or my friend who I’m basing part of my story on this is how she felt. And those parts are, seem to be landing. And so, I it’s a different experience, but it’s been good. And I love that you mentioned the way that we can better connect with people through fiction and to broaden our Range of empathy because there’s an article that I love from the New Yorker called Can Reading Make You Happier?
And in the article, the author talks about how fiction does statistically drive more empathy than nonfiction for the reasons you talked about. So, fiction really is an empathy machine. And so, when people tell me they only read non-fiction because they believe fiction is too much of an indulgence or a waste of time, I’m like, no, you’re missing the point.
you’re missing the point. And, Einstein said, if you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. Like it’s, there’s something about fiction that allows us to be.
M: Writing for reading and writing for Readers falls in that category of more professional creative writing. I want this to be out there and like you mentioned to, I think so interesting, having written a lot of different ways, written articles, written books, wondering what the reader wants versus now it sounds like exploring. What do I need to tell regardless of how it lands?
That feels more honest. What about writing, like reading can benefit us and reading fiction benefits. I love it. I love reading all the things. How does writing benefit us if we’re not planning on being professional writers?
I did a very quick Google Scholar search. I just wrote in “writing mental health women”, those were my search terms, and 3.2 million articles came up. That was my search results. I didn’t obviously scan through all of them, but there is a very clear, scientific, foundational, empirical connection between writing and health, and particularly mental health and specifically in women, which is what I narrowed my search to.
Can you explain some of that to us? What is your experience with that? With using writing as a tool intentionally to increase our wellbeing and. Benefit us, me benefited our physical and mental health.
K: Yeah. There’s so much and for me, my mom was the woman who first showed me the way with that, not just by handing me a journal, but by journaling herself.
She has tons of journals. She recently turned her journals into a book. She compiled them just for our family. And I read those, just a couple years ago and just bawling through the whole thing because I was able to go back in time to when she was my age as a mother, as a young mom and to read about her experiences and connect with her now in a deeper way than I ever could have if I wasn’t able to read and hear her voice from that time.
And she went through some hard things. She went through her first child dying of leukemia when she was five. When he was five, my brother. And then, a difficult divorce around the same time and getting married and then having a bunch of step kids and, and another marriage facing a new marriage and so much she’s been through so much and wrote about it and.
Wrote poems and wrote and she didn’t, she never published anything. It’s just for us, it was for her primarily. We, thankfully she allowed us to read some of ex excerpts, but that process I know was so healing for her and it’s why she, part of why she’s a healthy, functioning adult today because she didn’t silence her voice around it.
And some of the research I’ve been doing lately has been exciting and interesting. It’s by James Penna Baker. He’s a psychologist who is the founder of the term he calls expressive writing, and it’s, they’ve done a lot of studies around it. Specifically, it’s writing for 15 to 20 minutes a day about something upsetting for three to four days.
And in these studies, they have found that the people who wrote about something hard versus the control group who wrote about something superficial, those people who delved into, confessing their trauma and hard experiences recorded. Way less than half as many visits to the health center as those who just wrote about superficial things.
And then later in subsequent studies, they found that they had a higher immune system, higher immune function. They did this through blood draws and all these tests, and those benefits lasted up to six months, or not even up to about, that was the average, about six months. These participants benefited in those ways from that, less than a week of writing sessions.
And there’s a lot Interesting. It is. And there’s a lot of science about. Secret keeping, if you’re keeping difficult secrets to yourself that that can do to your heart health, your immune system, multiple systems within the body. Obviously, your mental health as well, but on a physical level as well.
M: Like Body Keeps The Score! Have you read?
K: I haven’t yet. It’s on my shelf, but I’ve heard a lot about the body Keeps the Score. I think I hear about it like twice a week. So, let’s do a book club. You and I will read it sometime in the next couple months. Okay?
M: I keep hearing about it, so I feel like I get it, like I, I understand the arc without having read all the details. I think the underlying principle of that is that, like you’re saying, difficulties, traumas, secrets, hard obstacles, challenges, stress. Those things live in us, in our physical bodies on a cellular level until we feel and release them.
And I was recently reading a study about the word trauma and how it’s becoming, we’re using it very easily. We’re people aren’t being precise with their words. Trauma doesn’t refer to the event. Trauma refers to the way that your body internalizes the event and the way that it stays in your body until it’s processed.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with my husband Dave, about the way that my, in particular, my own biological family, my sisters, my brothers, my parents have experienced very similar life events in very different ways and. Part of, I guess I feel like I’ve been a little bit mystified by how my, many of the hard things that our family has experienced, I don’t feel as quote unquote traumatized by as other members of my family who went through the same thing.
And the only thing that I can come back to is, wrote about everything that was happening to me as it was happening for my whole life. Journaling was a place outside of my head and body that my experiences could live, that I could process them. And I didn’t ever think of it as that. I didn’t ever think, oh, I’m processing my emotions.
But when I would, I kind of chuckle thinking of your mom printing her journals, because I remember as I was writing things down in like fourth and fifth grade, I’m going to have to come back with a sharpie before anyone reads this because I’m like using swear words and like things that I’m not supposed to say.
Like I was expressing a lot of emotions that I probably would’ve felt guilty expressing. I never would’ve said these things to my parents or to friends or I felt like those emotions were not okay to feel, and yet I could put ’em down on the page and leave them there. And it’s I don’t think I recognized at the time the way that I do now, how having a practice of writing allowed me to process in real time, hard things happening in my life so that I didn’t carry them with me for the rest of my life.
K: Exactly. And what a gift. What a gift to have been able to do that.
I’m so glad that you were, you had that self-awareness, or even without recognizing fully, you allowed yourself to swear in your journal and say things in your journal that you didn’t want to tell certain people.
I, and that’s the first tip I give to people when they want to start journaling. A lot of people have expressed when I’ve taught classes or things like that, they’re scared to write these things down because they’re scared of what will come out. And they don’t want to relive painful experiences. They want to move away from them.
They don’t want to focus on them and write them down, and they’re scared of who will read it. But just like you said, if we don’t address it, then it stays with us. So, when we think we are sucking it up and moving on and handling something well by ignoring it, we’re just suppressing it.
M: And just tucking it into your cells and feel it for the rest of your life.
K: Exactly. It manifests, there’s this whole study of psychosomatics and the way that the mind and the body are connected. It’s no longer like a woo woo thing, it’s a recognized scientific thing, and yeah, we are carrying those things with us as this constant hum of stress in our bodies. But by addressing it, by writing about it, we put those experiences into words, and by putting them into words, our minds can understand them, make some level of sense about them, and we’re able to move on.
So when and sometimes when you write about those things, I just want people to recognize it’s not going to feel amazing necessarily as you’re writing about the hard things. That’s not supposed to feel good necessarily. Sometimes getting something off your chest can, but I just, I’ve experienced this myself, and I know in these studies with Dr.Pennebaker, people didn’t feel good while writing. They felt worse, or almost that feeling of after watching a sad movie, that’s how they felt, but then the benefits started coming. They’re a little bit delayed. But as you continue to get out those experiences that are traumatic in the way you so beautifully articulated, not just because they’re typically traumatic, like we would label trauma.
What’s something that’s traumatic? What’s something that isn’t? It’s more of how you perceived it in your individual mind and body. Exactly. How did you perceive it and make sense of it or not make sense of it? How did it affect you? But as we write about those it does cleanse your body and mind of it and allows you to move on.
M: On such a very light level. I know with, often with my coaching clients when they’re becoming overwhelmed or confused, is an emotion that people will express a lot when there’s, many different choices or a lot going on. And one of the things we’ll do is write a list. Even just write not even in journal format, but let’s just write down all the different things that are coming to mind.
And even if they’re totally disparate things, like something from school, something from work, something from your sister’s birthday that you’re thinking about, something that your child said write it all down. And even just that, oh, you feel so much better because you’re not having to maintain, keep all the taps open.
You’re putting it somewhere so that you can then allow your brain to work on other things or choose one thing to work on for a little while. Or to think about to free up space. The processing. Our brain, I don’t think is meant to be used full-time as storage. It’s meant to be used as processing and innovation and creativity.
And so, there’s got to be somewhere else that those things are put down. And writing is a practical place to do that. I’m sure that there’s some people listening who are like, yes, I, I am drinking the Kool-Aid. I’ve been writing a long time too. I am a journaler, I’m a writer. I understand.
What about people who are listening and thinking, okay, yeah, like maybe, but also, I don’t have the time. I’ve never written before. No one ever told me that I was good at writing. In fact, I don’t feel very confident at all in my abilities. Where would you invite someone to, to begin if this is something that they haven’t done ever or haven’t done in a very long time and feel a little bit unsure?
K: Yeah, that’s a good question. And I would first say, let go of preconceived notions of what journaling must look like. And it doesn’t have to look a certain way. Just like you said, it can be a list. It’s not, you’re not writing a novel here. You’re not trying to please an English teacher. You can let go of grammar. You can let go of what your handwriting looks like or the possibility of someone reading it someday.
Think of it as an exercise just for you, you’re your own audience. That really sets the stage for getting the best bang out of your book when it comes to writing. And a lot of people do love free writing. And that’s how I am. I love to just; I don’t want anyone to tell me what to write. I just want to write and fill a page, even if I’m writing.
I don’t know what I’m going to write. Or if you write down, I don’t know how I feel today. If it’s total chaos, all the better. Because like you said, you’re getting it out of your mind and onto paper and you’re able to go somewhere from there. So, I just say to start and find a dedicated journal or notebook, it doesn’t need to be fancy.
I think that you will get more benefits from handwriting, even if that’s only once a week that you put pen to paper. If that’s a stopping point for you and you just need to type, that’s fine. You’re going to get; you’re going to get these benefits anyway. There is just something I love about the brain body connection that happens when you write, because there’s something, and I can get nerdy about it, but there’s something that happens in your brain.
This is, I’ll just read a quick quote from Mod Perel. She’s a psychotherapist and journaling expert, and she says that just as breathing exercises help integrate the body and mind. Writing is a psycho neural muscular activity that helps bridge and integrate the conscious and subconscious minds.
It distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thoughts and helps break the hole into parts. While your left brain is occupied by writing that’s your left brain, your writing, your right brain, your creative side is free to do what it does best to create intuit and feel. So that’s why I preach the writing by hand if you can because you’re using that hand to write down and then you’re able to free up space in your mind.
But however, you need to do it, just commit to write. I generally recommend if you’re starting for the first time or getting back into it, to write, to put pen to paper every day, and even if it’s for three minutes, set a timer if you want to., watch the clock, whatever, but three minutes, or don’t even set a timer, just put pen to paper.
If you write a sentence, awesome. If you write a list of five things, you’re grateful for or whatnot, five things that are just in your brain, that’s great too. If you’re just free writing and writing chaos that’s awesome too. But just putting pen to paper every day takes out the guesswork of do I today or don’t I today, or do I have time or don’t I?
You just do it to get into the habit and it doesn’t need to be a big ask and putting that journal or your computer open to a journaling document, putting it somewhere where you’ll see it every day, just to get your mind trained into doing that can be helpful. And yeah, you can free write, but if that’s really daunting, there’s so many prompts out there.
There are hundreds of prompted journals, there are prompts you can Google online. I’ll share some prompts as well if that’s helpful to have a prompt to get started. But I really think the key, as with anything, is get out of your head and get on paper and just part. Yeah.
M: Absolutely. I think that it’s important to reiterate that writing will make you feel better one way or another.
Like whether it’s through processing, whether it’s through witnessing, whether it’s through accessing emotion that you can’t access another way. I know that you shared about that study about writing about hard things and how that for six months makes people feel better. That’s wild.
I’ve read similar studies of course, because the field I’m studying is Positive Psychology about writing, about good things happening to you in your life. Or even there’s a really, it’s called a Gold Standard Empirical Study. It was a double-blind placebo-controlled study where people are writing down their vision for their best possible future.
This is just a creative writing exercise. It’s not so much journaling because it’s not about something that’s happened to you so much. It’s I don’t know, you would classify it as journaling, right? It’s for you, but it’s a, it’s like a projection of what is your best possible future that you can imagine and allowing yourself to just go there and write about it for 15 minutes.
The effects on people’s wellbeing, increase in positive emotion, decrease in anxiety and depression over a six-month period. It’s this little, tiny secret almost that like you want to feel a little bit better and stop feeling so bound up or held down. Just spend a few minutes writing and you can write about things that are hard, or you can write about things that sound delightful and lovely, and either way, you’re going to see benefits from putting that pen to paper.
I think I’m fall more on the prompted side that I’m like, okay, I, there’s too many choices. There are too many things. I wouldn’t know where to begin. What are some of your favorite prompts? If we were going to give people just a handful of prompts to try out, and I want to invite you listeners to choose one of these and make some space today.
You have three minutes, even if you needed to pause the episode for a little bit and just spend three minutes with a timer on and then come back to it. Try this out and see how it feels in your life.
K: Okay. So that’s the perfect segue into this first prompt.
- Writing about something good and meaningful to you.
And I’m, I know you’ve studied Shawn Achor and and his work and he talks about the doubler, which is when you write about something, a meaningful experience you’ve had in the past 24 hours. It can be something so tiny and simple I read a book with my child, or I watched the sunrise.
Something simple but meaningful to you. You can do it in bullet points, or you can free write it, it doesn’t matter, but just write down as many details as you can remember, even if there’s not a lot there. You can even say, I remember the sun was shining, or, I remember, the chair, the texture of the chair. It can be all these simple grounding things but write down details and your brain doesn’t differentiate between visual and actual experience, so you get to relive all the positive emotions of that experience.
Again, that’s why it’s called the doubler, and Sean Achor did this with the National MS Society and researched from the University of Texas found that if you have a chronic neuromuscular disease, chronic fatigue, and pain, and you do this for six weeks in a row, six months later, something about that six month, you can drop it.
M: It’s a typical measurement I think that they’re like, okay, what happens in six months??
K: Yeah. It’s a scientific measurement. There you go. You can drop your, these patients dropped their pain medication by 50%, which is a significant so anyway, so that’s the prompt. Just write about for two minutes, write about a meaning experience you’ve had in the past 24 hours.
That’s prompt number one I would suggest. And then the second one is going back to, opening about some harder things that you faced.
- Write about a concern you’re facing right now and the feelings it brings up for you.
So, spend time doing that, and then as a second piece to the prompt, write reassurance to yourself as you would to a good friend or child.
M: Talk about tapping into multiple sides of yourself as well. I feel like that one becomes a. and exercise in awareness of your own intuition and trusting yourself.
K: Yeah, so beautiful and resources that are in you. to help you and just takes, gives you that bird’s eye view of what would I say to someone going through this?
Yeah. So that one’s a good one. And then the third one I would recommend is:
- What are some things you’re looking forward to?
So, we’re jumping into past, present, future, right? I love to think of journal prompts that way where we dive into the past and we focus on the present, but then also look ahead and I know you and I have talked about how much we love having a trip or something fun to look forward to, and the joy that it brings us to have that on the calendar.
I think you’ve even done a podcast about this, where you mention it, but it infuses so much joy and hope into our lives right now. When we have something to look forward to, whether it’s a trip or a date or some time with friends or like movie night in your pajamas or time alone, anything simple or big that brings joy that you have planned of you.
And for me, especially in like darker winter months, it’s important to have those touch points so those anchors to look forward to. And it’s like the doubler exercise we talked about. This is a doubler in the reverse way where you get to live it before you do it before it happens.
M: Absolutely. Thank you. Those are great prompts. I, of course, the show transcripts are always in the show notes, so you can go find those specific prompts in the show notes.
I’ll probably put them into a little slide or something on Instagram as well, so that they’re easy to access and you can check back in with them. Those are great.
And just to wrap up, I know that you have a few different ways that people can connect with you, and particularly you had an exciting course that you put out earlier this year to help kids engage in writing.
K: So, I think that it, there can be a doubler where mom and kids get a little bit of help with starting on this journey if they have that interest or desire to. How do people connect more with you? Benefit from the work that you’re doing moving forward.
Yeah, so I am on Instagram as Talk Wordy To Me, and my website is talking wordy.com and this course you’re talking about is Write for Life.
And I launched that earlier this year as an umbrella company, for a lot of things I want to do. And the one I’m doing right now is working with kids be, but the sweet spot is between seven and 12 years old. Kids who are interested in writing and have a spark for creative writing and need someone to help nurture that.
And I am, I’m I was that kid. I was, I needed that nurturing and mentorship. And so, I love being that for other kids. And it’s been so fun to read the imaginative things these kids come up with. And I provide lessons and prompts and there, it’s a video course so it’s prerecorded. And so, they get these.
These courses, these video courses with prompts, writing prompts that they do every time and fun work, which is a happy name for homework that they do, writing homework. And then I also, the way that I engage with them in real time is that they send me their writing when I prompt them to, and I give them feedback.
And they’re also able to see each other’s writing in Google Classroom, so as peers to, to cheer each other on. And it really is a cool atmosphere and place for these kids to just really thrive in their creative writing and their confidence in writing. Yeah,
that’s cool.
M: And I can imagine as a parent of a child who’s interested in engaged, that you get to follow along with that process and engage with them at home as they’re going through the right for life course. And you can, kind of experience alongside them the things that they’re learning and cheer them on as well.
K: I also love to share book recommendations there. And there’s a million that I would. Share specifically to this episode that maybe I’ll send you, you can plop a few, put a list, show notes, something.
Because there’s so many women, like you said, who have written memoir and this essentially journaling, but for an audience that you can learn from to help kickstart your own stories and writing. So, I’ll share those with you as well.
M: Awesome. Thank you so much. I also, I’ll gather from Kim and have some of my own, some resources for, some of the prompted journals that we’ve talked about.
Of course, your former company is still producing incredible connective prompted journals. I have some other friends that have different types of journals that I can link for you.
And then a couple other friends that do writing courses for adults as well that you can tap into that I’ve participated in and found a lot of value in being guided along that process, which like I mentioned I’m like, oh, someone hold my hand and take me along the process. And helps keep me accountable as well. So, we’ll make sure that all those resource resources are available.
And I think that my hope, and my hope in sharing this episode was just to help you maybe pull back the curtain a little bit on the benefits of writing and how it might become practical and applicable in your life, regardless of the stage or season of your life that you’re in.
Kim, what final sort of encouragements or tips or ideas would you like to share with people before you wrap up today?
K: Yeah, I just, I want people to recognize that journaling and writing, it doesn’t have to be hard. And it’s not just for the quote unquote writers. The best, highest benefits you can get from writing are available to everyone.
And what a quick, easy, free way to add more happiness and healing to your life. So, I hope that you can just, like Miranda said, pick one of those prompts and start and just notice how you feel as you keep at it, and I think it will be transformative for you.
Awesome. Thank you so much for being here.
I love chatting with you always. And was so happy to share you today with my friends and listeners and I’ll catch up with you again soon.
K: Thank you so much, Miranda. That was so fun.
So, are you feeling inspired to pull out a pencil or pen, a piece of paper and to get some of those thoughts out of your head? Come up with some new ideas or simply let go of some of the stories that may be buzzing around in there. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this episode and that it feels meaningful to you to think about your life in terms of its story and the power that it can have to write that story, to process it, to get it out of your head where you can’t see it onto the page, where you may be able to look at it and consider it and reflect on it, and maybe even start to make little adjustments so that you’re living into the life that you want to lead.
I know that there’s so many ways that you can spend your time in so many different podcasts and books and movies and conversations that are vying for your attention, and I want you to know that I appreciate the time you spend here, and it means a lot to me. Not only that, but that I consider it as I’m creating this show.
I want this to be a place that you feel has value for you, that you can think about these things. Maybe conversations that don’t come up in your everyday life in the way that you might like that it just invites you to consider a new perspective. My goal here at Live Free Creative is to help you live a little bit more aligned with your purpose, to feel like you can live a life filled with adventure and creativity and intention.
So, thank you for spending this moment with Kim and me today. All of Kim’s information is in the show notes, so you can find her Instagram account to follow along. You can find her website. You can learn more about her course, her right for Life course for kids. And my final invitation to you today is to just spend a few minutes writing anything.
Whatever comes to mind, take pen to page, and see what happens. I hope you have a beautiful week, sending good energy your way. I’ll talk to you again next time. Bye-bye.
