How Writing Saved My Life

“Writing can save your life,” said Samantha Shad, screenwriter, attorney, teacher, in a recent presentation at a Florida Writers Association mini-conference. For her, writing became a way to deal with a serious ethical dilemma she faced in her early legal career. This thing nagged at her until she finally was able to face her demons, writing about the incident in a fictional account and then going through the many rewrites to polish the piece. By the time she finished, she had come to grips with her own values, her own decisions, and the outcomes of the issue. She had laid the demons to rest.

For 28 years I was a teacher. During the weekends I planned, graded, did paperwork, and then, if there was time left, I paid attention to the other necessities of life. Over the summer I was creating units of study, reading books that I would present to my students, and spending vacation time finding artifacts I could use back in my classroom in the fall.

A major change in policy in my school district curtailed my creative teaching and put me into a box of requirements that I knew my gifted/talented magnet program students both hated and found unchallenging. I had to explore options. Transfer? No, the box was district-wide. I was eligible for retirement, but I wasn’t ready. One more year in the box, however, led to physical illness, depression, and a husband running out of strategies to keep me afloat. It was time to walk away.

But now what would I do? For several months the answer was nothing. Play computer games and fall further and further into inertia.

One day in the spring following my retirement, facing another lonely day at home, I ran across a meeting notice in the Gainesville Sun for the Writers Alliance of Gainesville. My mind snapped back to 1979. We had moved from a street in Utah where 27 children lived in a two block area and all the moms stayed home, to Gainesville, Florida, where only a few children lived three blocks away, and nobody was in the neighborhood during working hours. Except me. On a lark I took a couple of creative writing classes at Santa Fe and wrote magazine articles and short stories, scoured the Writers Market magazine for calls for manuscripts, and collected lovely, personalized, form-rejection letters.

Yes! That meeting notice sparked a thought: I could resurrect my writing “career.”

I went to the meeting, and while I can’t remember the exact topic, I remember finding it interesting. I had a conversation with Susie Baxter, then the pod coordinator, and told her my tale of wanting to restart my writing. I had no clue as to what I wanted to write. I thought the best place to start was with something I knew well – my own life. Susie helped me and one of my former education colleagues, also retired and struggling to establish a new identity, begin a new pod, focused on writing memoir.

Excited to be writing again, a few months later out came the file folders and envelopes full of drafts and yellowed typewritten papers literally cut and taped together. Some weren’t half bad. They were pretty much all bad. But they had potential.

I’m not sure if writing has saved my life, but in working with three different writing pods in WAG and attendance at several writing conferences with Florida Writers Association, I’ve found a new identity, explored new horizons, made a group of dear friends, and set aside my own demons of loneliness and lack of identity.

Am I a writer? Absolutely. I may never have a book published (there is always hope), and I may not be the next J.K. Rowling, but I have found a new voice and resurrected an old passion. Instead of looking back, I am looking forward.

Maybe writing has saved my life. If not saved it, it certainly has made it much more meaningful. And happier. With special thanks to WAG.