How writing helped me heal

I have always found writing to be something that helped me to feel better. As a teenager and young adult I found myself keeping journals or letting my life experiences shape my short stories and other works of fiction, but in 2015 I stopped journaling and almost stopped writing all together. In January of 2016 I found myself going through the roughest break up of my life. I thought that I had lost the love of my life, but I had really lost an abusive jerk who was the reason for my lack of writing. It seems kind of funny that the man who drove me away from writing was the same man who drove me back to it. He left me in a state where I felt worthless, a state that reminded me of my teenage years where I used to write songs and poems to make myself feel better and so I dug up one of my empty journals and began to write again.  I began writing daily, but I still didn't feel so great. I was still detached from the person I used to be before I met him, a person with goals and ideas for the future. I started to revisit old projects, first was something I'd written a few pages of called Reaper's Quest. It was a mess of a novel, but I still published it. I took it down about a month later, and I was grateful that no one had bought it. I came across the file for Zombie Bite about this time, surprised to find it had a backbone and could make a great story with a little editing. I began to spend all of my free time typing up new scenes or editing old ones and soon became so engrossed in the novel that I was no longer thinking about how much of a failure I might be or how bad the jerk I'd dated made me feel. I was engrossed in the rather depressing world of Zoey and Eli. Would they find the cure? Would they die trying? I wasn't even sure yet. It seemed to take me forever to come up with an ending to the short story. I wrote and rewrote, scraped an entire ending that had to do with new characters. Although Zombie Bite is far from my best work (I may go back over it someday and make it longer so I can release it in book form), I do feel like it shows where I was at during the time that I wrote it. It's not a happy tail, and I wasn't a happy person at the time. I owe a lot to Zombie Bite, and although it will never be my favorite work, it is the book that made me a better person.