When Writing Feels Risky | Finding Hope

Several years ago, I wrote about how my Memory Hoarding OCD manifests: by compulsively writing, filling notebook after notebook with the details of every single day, every single event, every single feeling. I could easily fill a normal A5 sized notebook in under a fortnight. Journaling this way allowed me to document my life and provided me with a safe space to store all of my memories so I didn’t feel like I was constantly trying to carry them all. It also gave me a space to process everything that was happening and work out how I felt about it all. But the amount I needed to write down only seemed to grow, no matter how hard I tried to reduce it: I once wrote about fifty pages about a single concert, partly to document the show (a huge stadium tour date on a world tour with multiple sets, talking breaks, costumes, dancers, etc) and partly to try and process all of the feelings that were being brought up throughout the show. Trying to document every event began overwhelming the event itself; instead of being excited, I would dread them because I would already be anxious about the writing afterwards, calculating how much time it was going to take and how much further behind it would put me in my writing backlog.

I’d just about managed to keep up during my Bachelor’s degree but by the time I started my Master’s a couple of years later, I was writing so much that I was often days or weeks or even months ‘behind’ and I’d be writing all day everyday, just trying to catch up to the present moment. I’d managed to cut out a lot of ‘irrelevant’ detail but I was still writing for hours every day. It was already at this extreme level when I started my Master’s and my anxiety immediately increased as I tried to balance the courseload with the compulsive writing. I kept trying to make it work, make it manageable, but I just couldn’t and so, for months, I was pushing myself to the limit as I tried to do all of my coursework (and I found the jump from BA to MA brutal) and then spending every spare second filling notebook after notebook. I felt so much pressure to ‘succeed’ at both and the worse I felt about it all, the more I had to write; the anxiety was creating more for me to write about. I felt caught in the middle of a tug of war; the problem was just snowballing and I had no idea how to stop it.

Eventually I had to face the reality that, if the diary writing continued this way, I was going to fail my university courses and the only thing worse than the terror associated with my OCD was the terror I felt at the thought of failing the MA. The only way to stop writing was to stop entirely and it was agonising – similar but so much worse than the year I spent trying not to pull my hair out (whether that’s Trichotillomania, a compulsive habit, or a stim, I don’t know) and not even a solution as far as my OCD was concerned. Even as I poured all of my energy into my university work (which immediately took up all of my time but that’s a different rabbit hole, likely connected to my then-undiagnosed and still unmedicated ADHD), my digital memory hoarding increased and my Notes app usage grew exponentially as I continued to document everything as much as possible. That has been the half-measure I’ve been practicing and I hate it: it’s chaotic and incomplete and I’ve completely lost the emotional processing component of the practice. I’m not putting hours into writing every day but the compulsion to write hasn’t disappeared and I’m still constantly stressed out about it.

I absolutely do not want to go back to the amount of writing I was doing before but I miss the practice – the documenting and the processing – desperately; I wish I could have it back in a way that was fulfilling in the way it was but without it taking over my life and ruining my mental health. I want to be able to look back at this or that moment; I want to be able to let the emotions tumble out through my pen until they start to take some sort of recognisable shape; I want to be able to pour it all into a notebook and feel like I can breathe easier because all of those memories are safe. When it got out of control, the amount of time and energy going into it wasn’t healthy or sustainable but the work I was doing did have its benefits: because writing down my thoughts forced my brain to slow down, I was able to better understand what I was going through and the effect those events had on me; exploring my feelings in more depth and at a slower pace helped me to identify what I was actually feeling and sometimes why I was feeling that way and even helping me to let things go; and putting those experiences and emotions into words really drove my creativity because I was able to take what I’d written and turn them into songs or poems. Even the physical act of writing, of putting pen to paper, was regulating.

And even though my life is very different to when I was at university, starting to write a diary again – rather than this messy digital approach – feels like it comes with an inherent threat: as soon as you start writing, you will get trapped in that same spiral; as soon as you start writing, you will be constantly catching up. Even a quiet day can include more emotions than I have time to write about before going to bed (and arguably, digging into big feelings right before trying to sleep does not sound like a great idea) and when I already feel like there isn’t enough time in the day to get done everything I have to do, the idea of getting sucked back in to the hours and hours of writing is so overwhelming that I can feel the anxiety rising just thinking about it. And this doesn’t even involve the diary backlog of the last several years. It’s hard to accurately explain the feelings and the need behind it but it takes up so much brain-space and at the moment, I’m not even writing – I’m just thinking about writing.

I just don’t know how to keep a diary without it devolving into spending every waking moment writing; I don’t know how to reduce that writing without losing all of the parts that make it a fulfilling practice. This is where all of the advice I’ve read has failed: sum up the day in 1-3 sentences, write only X number of pages, or write only for X minutes… These ‘solutions’ either don’t fulfil the emotional processing element or I know already that I’ll just break the format because it’s preventing me from doing that emotional processing element. I’ve spent hours searching for strategies and/or advice, across every platform I can think of, using countless combinations of journaling and OCD, separately and together; I’ve posted across social media, I’ve talked to friends, and I’ve taken the problem to therapy but I cannot find anything that helps. I can’t believe that I’m the only person wanting to keep a diary but wanting to write less and yet, I haven’t found a single post that addresses this problem. My diaries have always served as a space for emotional processing, for making sense of my life and my feelings, for storing memories, for organising my thoughts before taking them to a more creative space. Maybe if it was for just one or two of these things or maybe if they weren’t all so intertwined, finding a solution wouldn’t be so apparently impossible. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where else to look. I don’t know who to ask. I’m stuck and feeling stuck is never good for my mental health.