WELLBEING FOR WRITERS
Discovery AND TRANSFORMATION
Author Suleika Jaouad writes from her lived experience about the power of journaling as a creative practice for writers
Photo by Nadia Albano
I’ve kept a journal for as long as I can remember. Journaling went from a favourite pastime to a lifeline when I was diagnosed with leukemia at age twenty-two. I approached treatment with youthful naïveté. I expected a short stay in the kingdom of the sick: a few weeks of chemo in hospital, followed by a bone marrow transplant, then back to life as I knew it.
But I spent the better part of a year in and out of the hospital. My immune system was nonexistent, and whenever I stepped out the door, I had to wear gloves and a mask. Being confined to a hospital bed, unable to do anything unassisted – even things as basic as taking a shower – sent me into a deep depression.
What pulled me out of that despair was a 100-day project, which originated with designer and Yale professor Michael Bierut, in which you perform one creative act daily for 100 days – a sketch, a poem, a photograph, whatever medium calls to you. The point of the project is to use discipline as a vehicle for creative inspiration. For my creative act, I chose the thing that had always given me comfort in times of turmoil: journaling.