I'm new to journaling. I've have tried to keep a diary many times I would start in the first of the year and by mid January I stopped writing. I have lots of reasons for that. The main reason was dyslexia. I have dyslexia. It's a pretty classic case - seeing worlds my mind reads differently (miss read) and horrible ability to spell correctly. I read and I absorb in formation fast, but I read slower than most people. I read well enough to earn a master's in public administration. The spelling is where dyslexia becomes obvious. In one paragraph I can spell the same word correctly and then completely incorrectly. As a kid the inability to be able to spell made keeping a diary a chore.

3 years ago I started working with a therapist for anxiety. I started writing my thoughts on paper. Often those thoughts were telling my story. I was using writing to process the things from long ago. It turns out I love putting my thoughts on paper. I love reading and rereading what I wrote.

At first I wrote in long hand. The process of thinking then seeing it on paper was therapeutic. In January 2024 I graduated from therapy and I shredded all the words I wrote over the previous 1 1/2. I had written about things and people in a way I would never want shared outside the therapy office.

I July 2024 I was diagnosed with cancer. I went back into therapy and started writing again. This time most of what I write is on forums like this one. This time around I'm mostly writing electronically and from my phone. While there still are misspelled words, wrong word and missed words the result is the same. I'm telling my story to help me process this part of my life. This time I'm keeping an electronic copy of what I wrote and I intend to keep them and I've begun to share them with a few select people outside of the forums. For example. I had written My Crohn's Story shortly after my diagnosis in 2022 and a gave a copy to the GI Nurse Practitioner because she's taken a special interest in caring for me as a GI patient who was diagnosed with cancer.

I find writing to therapeutic. I find the feed back I received in the forums to be very helpful for looking at my story with different perspectives.

Essentially what I'm doing is writing a memoir.

Denise