Nightswimming through Therapy

Two things happened  this week; one looking back, one looking forward. I watched a documentary on Michael Stipes and I discovered Therapeutic Writing. If you have never listened to REM or if you were a huge fan but have neglected your dotage, stop reading for a moment and put 'Nightswimming' on Spotify. Seriously, it's like floating face and palm upwards in a lake of pillows with the soul of your fourteen year old self navigating.

Stipes' advice to anyone involved in writing or creating anything was, 'Don't listen to anybody'. Once you get past the irony of him actually giving that as advice, you realise where his lyrics come from. They fall, unfiltered, from the clearest part of his experience of feeling. They seem to make no sense yet they perfectly described feelings I didn't realise I was having until he sang about them.

Whoever you are, no matter how wealthy, bitter, frightened, intelligent or self assured, you will have a heard a lyric or read a sentence once that stopped you in your tracks. Someone else, an entirely other human being, will have achieved the beautiful experience of putting their feelings into words. You encountered them and suddenly felt a little more known. I am so darn thankful to Mr. Stipes for not normalising his head; for allowing the words to somersault out as they did. C S Lewis always maintained, 'We read to know we're not alone'. Some of us read, some of us listen.

The documentary didn't say much about why Michael Stipes wrote. I don't know anything about his mental health or his personal life but I am willing to bet both were made more enjoyable because he wrote. There is something 'other' about the process of writing. Similar to listening to Stipes' lyrics, I discover what I feel once I've written it down. Until then, it is roaming my mind unidentified and sinister. My mental health and personal life would be in a much sorrier state without the therapy of writing.

This week I discovered this was actually a 'thing'. There is an Institute in America not to mention an entire body of psychologists devoted to the power of creative writing for therapeutic purposes. One task that caught my eye repeatedly through my reading was the simple exercise of writing a letter to someone who has wronged you in the past. You don't need to send it, you just need to allow yourself to say all the things you have been keeping fenced in. There is now 'scientific proof' (more on this as I research it!) to show that people are able to move forward emotionally once an exercise like this is completed. So simple and not rocket science but, sadly, this is the sort of thing we all know about but don't devote the time to actually doing. I am going to try it this week and I urge you to do the same - I really hope you feel a little lighter afterwards.

In the meantime, get back on Spotify and give yourself ten minutes to revisit a long-lost but long-loved lyric that gave your experience of this crazy life a name.