How Writing Saved My Life

When I talk about writing, I always feel like a fish out of water, as I was not the wunderkind who started writing at a young age. In fact, I’m not even a great reader. I was only able to finish one of the 7 Harry Potter books, well, when there were only 7 of them.

Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong in the writers’ guild, and since I’ve been on Medium I’ve met some very talented people who have accomplished amazing things. I admire and support them from a distance. I have seen how someone who started writing stories on his blog published his first book, as well as how some have made writing their main source of income. When they tell their stories, I feel so removed from them.

I started writing for fun at 18 years old, I started writing teenage rants on Blogger about things that seemed stupid to me, which was basically everything back then. It was like vomiting complaints, I was never interested in technique, metrics, improving, or evolving. It wasn’t until 3 years ago that I started to write more thoughtfully, I started writing video game and movie reviews on a website that paid me 0.0002 cents per paragraph. It was fun.

Now I am here, trying to make a living out of this, learning every day, and meeting amazing people who have helped me grow.

However, this is not a story about a mediocre writer who achieved success through hard work and perseverance, as I haven’t yet mastered fiction. It’s my story about how writing has been therapeutic for me, and in many ways, it saved my life more than once.

My early 20s were not the unstoppable party as I was promised it would be, in fact, they were very difficult years. Maybe karma was balancing things since my teen years were not traumatic as it was for many.

In just a matter of months, my best friend who was like a brother to me passed away from cancer, I was mugged and left with basically nothing, I was almost homeless, and I had the worst love breakup of my life (the first one). My grades in college started to go down and eventually I dropped out.

What did I do?

I started going to therapy and everything worked out just fine.

The End.

Just kidding, I wish. These were difficult times and even though I did end up going to therapy, it wasn’t until a few years later.

I started a new habit, I started writing random things in my notes app on the phone. They were usually phrases that occurred to me during the day, and since obviously, my mental health was not in the best place, the things that I was thinking were not the most joyous.

“I’ve felt like drowning so long that I learned how to breathe underwater.”

“Everything I touch turns to stone”

Little by little I began to accumulate these types of phrases in a note, they came to my head and I wrote them without knowing exactly why. Over time, the sentences became paragraphs, then texts. Everything started to make sense and I sculpted it, shaped it.

Without realizing it, I was writing a story, I gave it a beginning, a development, but never an end. I thought I needed a better place to capture all of that, so I created a new blog and began to rewrite everything there, I gave it an image, an identity, I added poems, songs…

One day I received an email from a very famous publisher and they told me that they wanted to turn my blog into a book and I’m currently a millionaire writing this from my Bentley.

I’m just kidding… you already knew that though.

It may sound silly, or it may not, but the minutes I spent writing that blog were minutes in which I did not think terrible things.

The dark thoughts disappeared for a moment, and the creative part of my brain began to work, giving a break to the other part of my brain responsible for making me feel sad.

From time to time I visit that old blog, it is like a diary of the worst time of my life, and although sometimes the feeling it generates is not pretty, it reminds me that I was able to overcome all that.

I called the blog “Saudade”, which is a Portuguese word that’s very difficult to translate into other languages, but its meaning is something like the following:

“Melancholy feeling due to the distance from a person, a thing or a place, or the absence of pleasant experiences already lived.”

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