davrob wrote:
This is not so much a reply as an addition to the idea of writing as therapy. I wonder how many of us have kept a diary, and I don't mean just a record of events, but of opinions, and thoughts on one's life, books, films etc. This too is therapeutic, and of course needs to be read again years later. I don't know about the reading being therapy but it certainly can be instructive. Try it.
Thankyou for your post, David.
It must be very interesting to look back in old diaries and read what you may have written years ago and to get an idea of what life was like then compared with now.
I didn't exactly write diaries but just what my thoughts and feelings may have been at the time of writing. There was usually too much to fit in a diary so wrote on scraps of paper or in notebooks.
Your word 'instructive' is interesting because someone who knew me years ago in Hayes, and who I have had the pleasure of meeting again, has read my set of books and now knows something of my more traumatic experiences. I am keeping her comments to put with others later, but she has been enlightened on something she couldn't understand by only hearing bits and pieces which we talked about in our short get-togethers.
Maybe what I have written could be called 'instructive' but more in story-form than taken from a diary, but the principle is similar.