Two friends of mine, both of whom lost sons to testicular cancer, shared this and it's perfect. Writing has always been a huge outlet for me from the earliest and darkest days, and if you can understand something well enough to write about it, you can find ways to overcome it and heal from it as well. It's just in our human nature to hold our pain within, and in essence we create our own mental prisons.
We tend to think we're all alone in what we feel, but the reality is that you're never alone. We're all unique and colorful individuals, but our humanity binds us, and we're all very much the same on the inside. We feel the same exact things, and hurt in the same exact ways. When I've been at my darkest and my lowest, it's neither answers nor even understanding that I've needed the most. Just knowing that I wasn't alone is what made it bearable, and in time, the answers that I needed came to me.
My wife, and even close friends, have seen me in tears from writing about things that have been very painful for me, and they've asked why I write if it causes me so much pain? The answer is that it's not causing me pain. That pain has already been there, and the writing that I do is a way of letting that pain out, so that I can be free of it and won't have to suffer from it any longer. It's been one of life's blessings to see so many people respond in such positive ways to my own writing simply by sharing my life in such a way, and to have been a key that's helped to unlock others from their own prisons and pain. Writing is the single most powerful thing that I've ever done after cancer, not just for others, but for myself. No one fights alone. We can all heal together.
StevePake.com
