Writing your Way to Wellbeing: Therapy and Beyond
Nothing in John Steinberg’s early years suggested that writing might, one day, play such a crucial part in his life and mental health.
That I was blessed with a charmed childhood, growing up in the leafy suburbs of North West London, however, left me woefully ill-equipped to deal with two devastating events over thirty years ago, leaving me bereft of a wife, who had succumbed to cancer, together with a loss of employment, when the family business ran into trouble.
Left with sole charge of our young son, there was little option but to get my life back on an even keel. Meanwhile, the psychological damage that been caused only manifested itself later and, then, in a most unexpected way.
Meanwhile, it was increased feelings of underachievement in my commercial career that led me to see if there was anything else I could do to make me feel better about myself.
Starting to write
I’d always been interested in comedy but it took the prompt from a friend, also called John, to see whether I could make more of the half dozen quips I’d made up. Unfortunately, the humorous greetings cards that evolved were deemed too self-deprecating to catch on and the image on whom they were based, probably too close to me!
But I wasn’t deterred. Now writing had become a daily routine, I was eager to exploit an idea of a political comedy, which was the start of a collaborating writing process with Ray, a director to whom I was introduced, who thought it had potential for the stage. Immediately hitting it off, we set about writing a script, not that I had the slightest notion what this entailed. I learned on the job about how to write dialogue and stage directions, and six months later, a play emerged, entitled In the Balance. It opened at the New End Theatre in Hampstead in November 2008.
The result of this escapade was some good press, but as the producer, I managed to lose a fair amount of money in the process and was unable to recoup my investment, since it didn’t quite make the transfer to a larger West End stage!
The problem was I had now got the writing bug and was determined to carry on.
Becoming an author
Against both our better judgments, a second play was written by Ray and myself about the Financial Crisis at that time: it had the evocative title of W for Banker. This time around with the benefit of a shorter run and half the cast, losses were considerably reduced but unlikely to be eliminated, unless we could come up with a monologue with either of us in the main part, working for free!
Ray then went off to pursue new challenges, while I needed to find out whether I was capable of writing on my own.
A chance introduction to a publisher, led me to a change of direction. Although, I’d never written anything that came close to a novel, one of my plays about a gladiator, who became a famous sage had some reasonable dialogue and just needed expanding. Easier said than done, when a book has to be three times the length.
After going through the pain of several rewrites and we proceeded to the final edit, I experienced a genuine sense of loss, since the work I had immersed myself in for the last year was coming to an end. The prospect that the characters I had created were no longer mine left a vacuum that needed to be filled.
Fortunately, Shimon, which was published in 2014, received a positive response from another publisher and this gave me the confidence to proceed with my second novel about a German woman’s journey of conscience in the aftermath of World War Two, Blue Skies Over Berlin, which was published in 2016. A third Novel, Nadine about a failing theatre producer was published in 2019.
As more novels were written with a recurring theme of personal Journeys, I realised that it was purely an attempt to come to terms with my unresolved issues. That was the reason I’d become obsessed about writing because there was so much to say. It was simply my therapy.
And this brought another valuable outcome, the tools to work out problems on my own. I’d learned to apply the same technique of solving difficulties in plot and character development, when there was no one to ask, to a whole range of other concerns.
However, it wasn’t until my fourth novel, the semi-autobiographical The Temple of Fortune in 2020, which mirrored much of my own traumatic experience, that I could truly say I came to terms with the past.
How writing changed my life
Writing literally changed my life. That may sound a little dramatic but it is true.
Looking back, while there was unquestionably a need to come to terms with a personal bereavement thirty years previously, a condition of low self-esteem that had persisted since childhood equally needed to be addressed. Writing, or more accurately, learning to write, managed to make significant inroads into both. This I found surprising, since I had never previously shown the slightest interest or indeed any aptitude in the subject.
Discovering that there was something else I could do, something that belonged to me exclusively, facilitated a retreat from an unfulfilling career in business. I had stumbled upon something of immense value.
Writing is a hard, often frustrating and a solitary pursuit, but because it’s also completely absorbing, crucially, it has the potential to be a worthy antidote to loneliness.
The main benefit to wellbeing, I’m convinced, is in the process itself, which for me went far beyond even the two significant issues I mentioned above. To my surprise, I found that while creating my fictional characters, I was getting to know my own self. Writing has also helped me to achieve a change of mindset: these days, I’m no longer preoccupied with unrealistic pursuits as before. As with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, writing has provided me with the tools to work out problems, not just confined to literary ones, on my own.
Most importantly for me, currently, is that writing daily provides new challenges that are in themselves an essential source of maintaining a state of mental wellbeing - and for this I shall always be extremely grateful.
I hope you found this blog post helpful in some way and I’m always keen to hear your thoughts - let me know over on Twitter @RachelKellyNet
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in 1952, John lives in North London with his wife and three children. Privately educated, John left school after A levels and completed a business diploma before entering banking.
He started training as an accountant but didn’t complete the course, choosing a position in his family’s furniture manufacturing business instead. John started his own Mergers and Acquisitions business in 1987, which he ran for twenty years before quitting to become a full time writer in 2007.
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