Does Writing Improve My Autoimmune Disease and Mental Health?

Welcome back to Musings of an Arthritic Artist! 

Today is going to be another personal post, this one involving the impact writing has had on me, especially regarding my mental health, arthritis, and creativity.

Let's get into the post!

King, Alexandria. Musings of an Arthritic Artist. 2021.

Emotions can both positively and negatively affect my mental and physical health. It makes being an empath hard. I can feel other people's emotions as if they're my own, however this becomes a major problem if I internalize those feelings or dwell on them. I try my best to avoid that, but sometimes I fail. I’ve learned what I can and can’t handle. 

Unless it’s necessary, I avoid reading or watching the news (it’s usually not necessary; I get the most important news from my parents and sister). Watching the news is boring (unless it’s for local sports), and reading and watching it does a number on my mental health, which in turn, can do a number on my physical health.

As I mentioned in my book review for New Moon, the second book in the Twilight Saga, I have to be very careful, because it's no secret that depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses can emerge from living with autoimmune disease and other chronic illnesses, along with being an empath. I have personally never been diagnosed with a mental illness, but I'm aware that there is a relatively high risk of me developing one. Once you have one chronic illness, the chances of developing another are even greater. Especially if you're already a highly sensitive person.

Personally, I get my depressive spells every now and again (along with anxiety-type episodes), but I'm not sure if that's normal or not. I don't know enough "normal" people to answer whether my episodes are normal or not.

Now that I've done a basic intro to how cautious I need to be, I'll get into the point of this post, which is writing.

___________________________________________________

Common advice for self-care/mental health is that writing down the emotions you feel helps, usually when you write in a journaling format. This helps to get your thoughts out of your head, at least somewhat. This might work for a lot of people, but not me. I have tried diaries dozens of times, but I'm never consistent. I'll go months without writing anything. 

I have been incredibly interested in writing for the past 4 years, since I was in my early teens. I have been trying to write a book since. When I started, I didn't have much experience. I didn't know anything about characterization, plot, pacing, or any of those fun writing tidbits. I wrote in passing. It was a hobby. I've thought about being an author-illustrator since I was a child, but I never thought much about chapter books or novels. 

___________________________________________________

In 2017, I gave it a try. I started a middle grade urban fantasy that quickly became a YA urban fantasy. I wrote characters I still love to this day, but when I was writing, I always felt distanced from it. I wasn't engaged, and there wasn't much emotion involved. It was a relatively dull draft, even though I edited it dozens of times. I still intend to finish it, but it isn't a priority.

In 2018, I began a different story, this one a YA fairytale retelling with Greek mythological aspects. That project was better than the previous one, and I am definitely going to go back and finish it. Until I started my new project, this one had the largest word count at around 50,000 words.

In 2019, I began feeling overwhelmed over the amount of creative writing projects I had started. I had about a dozen fairytale retellings going. I had fantasy stories galore. I have 44 different stories saved on my computer, though I know there are quite a few more. I never exceeded more than 30,000 words on a single project. This may seem like a lot, but most of the stories I began were only 10,000 at most. No ideas could hold my attention. I always started a different one depending on my mood.

Looking back, I guess it's kind of silly to have gotten overwhelmed over this. I'm only a teenager, and I was already worried about not finishing any of the projects I had already started. Then again, that's one of my problems. I'm great at starting projects, but I never finish them. In fact, I have quite a few art projects that have yet to be finished.

I guess I needed a global pandemic to come up with the story idea that has motivated me to continue writing it. The Greek myth inspired fairytale retelling had kept motivating me to finish it, but it required more research than I had time (and energy) for. After all, I am still in high school. I have responsibilities, studies to focus on, and a chronic illness to manage. 

___________________________________________________

At the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, I had started a quarantine diary, which was a private place for me to share what I did and how I felt on specific days, separated by day (blank) of quarantine (in case you are wondering, my sister and I haven't been out in public in 381 days, and no I haven't gone insane).

This became overwhelming. Even though I was writing all my emotions down, it wasn't helping. My mind was still a mess. It wasn't helping my arthritis, instead only helping to exacerbate it. During this quarantine period, I had four joints that had been bothering me, one still to this day. 

Around this time I had been doing a lot of pondering on chronic illness. It was the second week of May, we still hadn't known much of anything about the virus, and I knew everyone in my family was more susceptible. At the time, my family and I were quarantining in our house away from each other. My sister was in charge of bringing food to my door. 

It was a difficult time. There was a lot of stress, in my room especially. My father could've been sick. My mother could've been sick. My mind was truly an awful place. Despite that, I still motivated myself to be on a schedule, waking up every morning at 6 and going to bed no later than 10:30. My sister and I were considered more on the "safe" side, but we were still separate for precautionary reasons. 

The stress seemed to pile and pile. The worst part was that this was two weeks before my seventeenth birthday. I didn't even know what would happen that day. Would we still be in quarantine? Would I have to spend my birthday by myself in my room? Because my mind refused to stop racing, I began distracting myself by watching YouTube, movies, and doing SAT Prep on Khan Academy. I wasn't motivated enough to pick up any of the writing projects I previously mentioned.

Instead, I had continued writing in my quarantine diary, but I began to lag behind on entries, as per usual. I lacked the motivation. Even though I was writing my emotions down, I was still dwelling on reality because the diary itself was reality. I didn't wish to focus on the world around me. I didn't want to focus on the world that felt as if anything and everything could go wrong.

I started reading, but that didn't work either. I wanted to read a young adult, middle grade, or children's book about someone who had chronic illness or a disability, but I barely found anything (at least at my library at the time; my library has since gotten more e-books about autism and things like that--it still isn't the same, but I'd definitely read them if I was in the mood). I couldn't get into any other story. I don't know why that's the kind of book I wanted to read. To be honest, I probably started at least a dozen, but at the time, I DNF'd them all. I wasn't feeling any of what I picked up. 

Instead, I began writing two stories. I have a story about a teenage girl with juvenile idiopathic arthritis who has a service dog, and a YA fantasy novel with a main character who has chronic pain. There are more layers besides that, however. I wanted to write the book I had so badly wanted to read at the time, knowing that somewhere, someone else probably wanted the same thing. However, I just knew that I had to write this story first and foremost for myself. I began pouring my heart, soul, and emotions into the Fantasy story. 

I'm still working on it. It's been one of the main things keeping my heavy emotions at bay. It's better than feeling miserable and lashing out at my family. It's better than falling (metaphorically) into a dark abyss, and having to scramble to find my way out. 

It's been almost a year since I began that story (now a series), and I have about 75,000 words on the first book alone, about 145,000 across four books, though I didn't write parts of the fourth book until last August.

___________________________________________________

I will say that writing has definitely helped my mental health. I feel as if I'm calmer, less stressed, and I feel as if I put up fronts less. I still do, but they're less frequent (my family can't really tell when I am or not, however that's the point). Generically speaking, my family knows I put on a mask. They know I bottle up emotions, though they don't always know when or why, but I digress.

Another thing that sometimes helps my mental health is drawing, however that can get messy. If my wrist starts feeling worn, I end up stressing about that (one of my biggest fears is using my wrists so much that I won't be able to draw, write, or paint anymore; this in turn sometimes leads to me having a fear of drawing or using my hands). I can't type or write all the time either, but I can at least brainstorm, interview characters, or plot ideas in my head, without having to use my hands. I could think of drawing ideas, but that'll just make me want to draw more, so I tend to avoid that unless I need them.

For me writing helps, as long as what I'm writing isn't worsening my mental health, which is what the quarantine diary had been doing at the beginning of this pandemic. When I journal, I am never consistent and for me, the emotions I write down feel too real. I worked around that, and poured all of my emotions into the YA Fantasy series I mentioned above, so it functions as an emotional outlet. The story itself is pretty heavy emotion-wise, especially for me, but I'm enjoying myself, and I'm hoping I can get this plot worked out to where I am comfortable having someone else read it (that someone beginning with my older sister). 

But until then, it'll stay as it is.

That's it for this post! I hope you enjoyed it!

See you Thursday,

Lexi K🖌

Further information:

Arthritis Foundation: Juvenile Arthritis and Depression (opens in new window)

Arthritis Foundation: Arthritis and Mental Health (opens in new window)

Arthritis Foundation: How Stress Affects Arthritis (opens in new window)

Arthritis Foundation: The Emotion-Pain Connection (opens in new window)

Arthritis Foundation: Juvenile Arthritis and Body Image (opens in new window)