Writing Is Cheaper Than Therapy. Allegedly.

There is a popular suggestion that writing is cheaper than therapy. This is probably true, provided you don't count the notebooks, the coffee, or the hours spent staring into the middle distance like a Victorian widow. I haven't worked out the figures. I've been rather busy with divorce, career changes, children graduating, beloved pets dying, and my mother's Alzheimer's. Apparently, life looked at my calendar and decided there was still room for a few more plot twists.

If I put all of that into a novel, an editor might tell me to tone it down. Too much happening to one character. Not believable. Give the poor woman a nice afternoon in the garden. Unfortunately, real life has no editor, no sensible pacing, and absolutely no interest in character development occurring at a convenient time. It simply carries on, expecting you to remember to buy milk while your entire sense of normality is being quietly dismantled.

Divorce has a particular talent for making ordinary objects feel loaded. A mug, a leather-bound notebook, a grocery item bought out of habit that no one in your house actually eats anymore. Things you never noticed suddenly seem determined to deliver a speech about the past. Writing gives me somewhere to put those speeches before they start running the household. I can be angry on the page without running it through ChatGPT to make sure a court would deem it appropriate, rather than having me sectioned. I can admit that something hurts without adding the compulsory, reassuring “but I'm fine.” Sometimes I'm not fine. Sometimes I'm simply doing the laundry.

Then there's the business of changing careers, which sounds wonderfully brave when described afterward. While you're in it, there are moments when it feels more like setting fire to a map and hoping the smoke forms directions. One day you're reinventing yourself, embracing opportunity, and looking confidently towards the future. The next, you're Googling things you were certain adults were meant to know by now. My notebook doesn't demand a five-year plan. It accepts “I have absolutely no idea” as a perfectly respectable opening sentence.

The children graduating should be an uncomplicated triumph. And it is a triumph. I'm proud, ridiculously proud. But pride and sadness can sit together, apparently, without asking permission. You spend years encouraging them to become independent, capable people, then feel personally betrayed when they do exactly that. Their lives are opening up, as they should. Mine is shifting shape again. Writing helps me celebrate who they're becoming while quietly mourning the versions of them who needed me to find lost shoes.

Losing pets is another kind of heartbreak entirely. People say “just a pet,” which is an excellent way to ensure I never ask them for emotional advice. They were part of the rhythm of the house, the ordinary comfort of being loved without explanation. Then suddenly there is silence where claws tapped, or a favorite sleeping spot stays empty. I write about those little things because they are the things I miss. Grief isn't always dramatic. Sometimes it's reaching for a bowl you no longer need.

And then there's my mother. Alzheimer's is a particularly cruel thief because it takes things in pieces, often while the person you love is still sitting in front of you. There are feelings I can't tidy into anything presentable: sadness, frustration, tenderness, guilt, even the occasional desperate laugh at the absurdity of it all. On the page, I don't have to choose the acceptable emotion. I can love her, miss what is changing, and admit how frightening it is to watch. All in the same paragraph.

That, I think, is what writing gives me. Not answers, necessarily. Certainly not a cure. A notebook is no substitute for professional support when it's needed, and I've yet to find a pen qualified to untangle a family crisis. But writing creates a small, honest space in which I don't have to be resilient, upbeat, or terribly good at coping. I can be contradictory. I can be furious. I can write something dreadful, cross it out, and begin again.

So yes, I write instead of bottling everything up, and sometimes instead of talking when I haven't yet found the words. The page can take the first, messiest version. It doesn't interrupt, offer clichés, or tell me everything happens for a reason. Which is fortunate, because if everything happens for a reason, someone owes me a very detailed explanation. Until then, I'll keep writing. Not because it makes life neat, but because it helps me live with the mess.