Wellbeing is something that can be difficult to define exactly as it is so subjective, but I think it is safe to say that it revolves somewhere around the ideas that any individual might have relating to their best possible health and contentment at any given point in time.
In itself, that is a bit of a vague definition, but deliberately so, on my part. I feel that most of us go through life changes where sometimes we are fortunate in our circumstances, whilst, at other times, that can feel quite far away. And so, the distance between our current self and that state that can be described as maximum wellbeing can vary enormously. The kinds of factors that can play a role are our health, housing, employment status, educational opportunities, age, sexual orientation, gender identification, childhood experiences (particularly if abusive), cultural background, ethnic origin, and degree of privilege. And given that this is the case, ‘Wellbeing’ becomes an even more complex concept to consider, and address. It can lead some of us into therapy, counselling or complex pharmacology, constantly seeking solutions from self-help texts or coaching solutions.
Bibliotherapy, often existing as a means of social prescribing, can offer some help, particularly in navigating the extensive self-help or personal development texts available, but also finding literary texts that can be helpful.
For those of us who are writers, we sometimes seek to make use of exercises, techniques or prompts that are easily identified as being beneficial when considering writing for therapeutic purposes, such as journalling, freewriting or ‘survivor poetry’.
For myself, I spent 6 years in a writing group for wellbeing, and I am now pursuing that very subject at the postgraduate study level. Thus, I find writing for wellbeing to be enormously helpful. And yet, I still find it difficult to define ‘wellbeing’. I have seen widely varying examples of people writing for wellbeing which are enormously different from one another, whether those examples are poetry, nonfiction, short stories or entire novels, or the various products of techniques, prompts or inspiration from artworks, or pre-existing writing in various forms.
It is my belief that, in theory, the degree of variation can equal the number of human beings taking part in such writing, and then it can be dependent upon various factors during the day such writing is taking place, that being anything from the weather, current life circumstances, degree of relationship harmony, triggering prompts, other people in the room, time available, or just about any other varying factor that you can think of.
This doesn’t mean, as some might suggest, that ‘writing for wellbeing’ is not worth doing or is meaningless or that it is enough that all writing could be viewed as therapeutic in some way, or at least not to me. My feeling is that it should make us more responsive to the people around us, ensure that we consider all voices from all dimensions of humanity, and increase our respect for our fellow human beings in the process.
I am in my sixties, and I am not looking to start a new career or to publish lots of books, or similar, but I am aiming to focus on writing for wellbeing both for myself and hopefully in the future to share that experience in some way with others.
My experience on Medium to date is many and varied, and will likely continue to be so, whilst I additionally continue to contemplate what it means to write for wellbeing. I don’t expect to come up with a definitive answer any time soon, but being accepted here, to Soul Magazine feels like a big step forward.
Fraser
January 2024