How can fiction help Depression

When I was eleven, I discovered I loved to write. I wasn't very good at it, but I loved it. So I kept doing it. By the time I was fourteen, I could write 30,000 words monthly. I had all kinds of ideas. They weren't always the most original ideas, but they meant a lot to me. I was never happier than when I was writing.

This did not last.

When I was fourteen, I met a boy. He was seventeen and gorgeous and told me I was beautiful and memorable. I was awkward, overweight, shy, and almost friendless, still in the middle of puberty. I wanted to believe him. He made me feel good about myself. But he didn't like that I spent all my time writing instead of talking to him. So I stopped because I thought I loved him more as much as I loved writing. I thought that was how it was meant to work.

Before long, it wasn't enough that I'd stopped writing. He wanted me to stop reading, too. He was severely dyslexic and was embarrassed by that. He thought my reading and writing were just a way to show him up. So I stopped.

I stopped doing a lot of things. I stopped talking to the few friends I had. I stopped all my hobbies. I spent all my time waiting for him to tell me what to do next.

I don't know if there is a way to describe how afraid I was when my phone went off while I was with him. I can still remember the look on his face when he heard it. But it wasn't until he sent me home one night, after our regular "date night" with two broken ribs, that I finally knew it wasn't an accident when he hurt me. It wasn't that he was bigger and stronger than me and didn't realize how much; he wanted to spoil me.

But I was fourteen. I didn't know what to do. I thought he'd stop hurting me if I stopped making him angry. It didn't work. The more compliant I became, the more he'd demand of me. I'll spare you the details. All you need to know is that it took six months from the day he broke my ribs for me to leave him.

So there I was. Fifteen years old and with a secret that was destroying me. I didn't tell my parents. I thought, still that it was my fault. So I didn't start writing again. I didn't start reading again. I tried to, but I couldn't enjoy it. I wouldn't want anything.

I didn't write again until I was eighteen, not really. I wrote a bit of fanfiction over the intervening years, but the ideas were always prompts given to me by friends, and it wasn't something I loved any longer but a way to pass the time.

But at eighteen, I went to university. I almost didn't- the feeling I'd had since I was fifteen, that nothing was real, that nothing mattered, my inability to care or enjoy a moment of anything- that mindset nearly destroyed my A-Level results. It was only because I remembered just enough to scrape a pass in the exams that I even got into university.

And I did a creative writing degree.

It was an accident, in a way. When I looked at schools, I'd searched for politics degrees and had accidentally wandered into the wrong presentation. Instead of talking about what a degree in international politics could do for my career, I heard someone telling me I could do a degree in my idle hobby.

For someone who didn't care, it seemed like a good idea. I wouldn't have to do anything that I wasn't doing already.

Except, I'd gone from writing 30,000 words a month with ease to writing the same amount over a whole year. So when I rocked up at university, I had much more work than expected. I needed to write a lot more than I expected.

And… I did. I sat down, and I'd churn out two or three thousand words in a day. They wouldn't be perfect words, but they were there. I was writing them. I created worlds and people, and I gave some of them my own problems, and I could look at it and think, "how would they deal with this?" and then I could take that answer and apply it to myself.

Writing healed me. It gave me a way to vent, put out all the fear and shame I had been harboring for three years, and heal. It gave me a way to understand emotion again. It gave me a way to re-learn how to talk to people and relate to them because in the endless quest to make my writing better, I had to learn how to make it real. It helped to make me a person again, not just a body play-acting at humanity.

You don't have to write well for fiction to help your depression. You don't even have to share what you write. But creating characters who can relate to you, to even one tiny part of your own struggle, and thinking, "what do they do next?" can help. And for me, it was much easier to follow the advice of someone who wasn't real and couldn't judge me for my weaknesses than to find a natural person and ask them for help.

Writing is an escape, and fiction is a place where people feel things. It's the best place you can be when you're living with depression. It's an activity where you can set goals, and that sense of achievement, however arbitrary its cause, will help.