Mental Health I: Why Do I Write?

The first in a series of five essays about Mental Health to celebrate the dog days of August.

I’d been writing words and sentences since the first grade. As a person of engineering temperament, I expressed myself with logic and clarity (my specifications for concrete were top-notch). But I can pinpoint the specific date when I first tried to express the vagaries of my heart and soul. Summer 1996. Sitting at a picnic table under a tree outside a weathered guest house in Provincetown. Scribbling phrases on notecards to make sense out of the lightening chaos with which this stable married family man became a single gay dad.

My therapist at the time — I can’t remember which one, there’ve been so many — counseled me to journal. Really? No thanks. I saw little to be gained in documenting my screwed-up present. Instead, I selected points of experience as the premise for a barely-concealed autobiographical novel. It took me three years to complete Sing Out Loud. When I began, I had no idea how the book — or my life — would resolve. The manuscript sits in a box on a shelf, which is where my amateur effort belongs. But creating the book became a case of life imitating fiction: I literally wrote myself to a happy ending. The process brought me immeasurable value, and established writing as my preferred form of therapy.