Krista Chesal, Content Solutions Specialist

This year has been a time of incredible personal growth for me. It’s also been extremely challenging, and those two things are not unrelated! But of course, it’s only in retrospect that I can see how the challenges fed the growth. At the very least, I can say that I am ending the year with the most peace and calm I’ve ever experienced.

Partly, this is due to to a crazed period of cleaning and organizing I went through in September. I realized that there were boxes in my basement that I’d moved internationally and back and forth across the continent! I was sorely tempted to chuck them without looking, but I’m glad I didn’t. They were full of old notebooks of my writing and a Freewrite Neo2 with text files. A lot of it was terrible garbage, but there were some bits that didn’t make me immediately cringe, and a scant few I thought were actually pretty good.

This prompted me to revisit all of my old writing. It took me from September until now to re-read, sort, toss, or file decades of notebooks and files and envelopes of post-its with ideas that seemed important in the middle of the night. I took some time to re-visit my Master’s thesis, which surprised me for it’s aptness to the exercise I was completing.

My thesis examined the benefits of journal writing for people experiencing long term stress such as caregivers for whom traditional avenues of support (for example: therapy and hired help) are not accessible. The paper earned me an A, but more importantly, the research I did to write it legitimized my life-long need to write. As long as I can remember, I have written. And I always felt vaguely guilty and a bit embarrassed about my desire and my efforts. But going over my research notes and drafts highlighted that writing is a worthy endeavor for so many reasons, and cleared up a misconception I’ve been dealing with for decades that writing needed to be productive to be worthy. This year, I’m giving myself permission to explore this in depth; not for a client or a professor, but for myself, and for any of you who’d like to join me! I’m glad to see the end of 2024, and looking forward to 2025. Happy New Year!