I read an interesting article today on the therapeutic benefits of writing, especially fiction. The author, Jessica Lourey, writes:

I came to call this healing process “rewriting my life,” as I was taking real events and repurposing them to fit a fictional narrative. The power of this process is transformative. Writing fiction allows you to become a spectator to life’s roughest seas. It gives form to your wandering thoughts, lends empathy to your perspective, allows you to cultivate compassion and wisdom by considering other people’s motivations, and provides us practice in controlling attention, emotion, and outcome. We heal when we transmute the chaos of life into the structure of a novel, when we learn to walk through the world as observers and students rather than wounded, when we make choices about what parts of a story are important and what we can let go of.

And of course, the aim is not to publish this for the world to see - although that might be the path you choose.  It's the process that's important, so you can burn your novel, stuff it in a drawer, shred it, bury it in the backyard - whatever.

Try it, dear reader, and let me know how it goes.