About Writing

Unorganize is intended to be an anarchist blog—but I’m willing to deviate a little.  In this post, I’m going to write about writing.  Writing has been singular—as a practice—in influencing positive life change.  What has been challenging about writing is keeping up with the reading that is necessary to generate new ideas with consistency.  Writing is an intellectually taxing endeavor, but one with tremendous rewards.

After writing a mental health recovery blog for seven months, I signed on to write for an online magazine called Vermont Views.  I wanted to continue writing on mental health; but writing on recovery was no longer my mission. I wanted, instead, to write a social criticism on the mental health system.

By the time I signed on to write for Vermont Views, writing was very important to my feeling that I had something to contribute to society.  I needed to be successful in publishing.  For that reason, I began reading as much psychiatric history as I could.  It was the only way to continue writing on mental health while generating enough new ideas to keep up with weekly publishing.  My column at Vermont Views was called My Side of Madness; I wrote fifty-six essays in keeping with the intent of that project—for which I read about thirty books.

Quantity of writing is important—if you are going to be good in writing you will have to write a lot.  But quality may still be more important.  I approach improving the quality of my writing as I would attempt to improve my comprehension in reading.  I study the English language with as much ardent discipline as I did studying psychiatric history.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I have deviated from the anarchist theme to this blog.  But writing has been a catalyst for my own emancipation from the confines of the mental health system.  I believe that as we learn to roam the intellectual landscape, we open ourselves to a more self-directed mode of living.  And realizing individual freedom is a great first step to promoting revolution.