If Your Writing Is Tied To Your Personal Experiences — Set Boundaries

A series on how to stay creative and healthy when tapping into your life experiences

So many people resonated with one of my latest Medium posts, If Your Writing Is Tied To Your Personal Experiences — Keep This In Mind, that I’m turning that post into a series. The comment section alone offers a slew of different topics we can cover at the intersection of creativity, lived experience, and mental health.

We know that setting boundaries is good for our mental health. We, as a collective society, have become more encouraging of implementing those lines in our relationships or even with our self-care, but it’s still hazy when it comes to how we approach our creative outlets.

The speed at which hustle culture moves doesn’t help. There’s a fast pulse of action that we get wrapped up in and that we don’t know how to pull the brakes on.

Building out a creative outlet, writing or otherwise, that’s attached to your personal experience only makes the ground even more of a minefield. Is it a passion project? Is it a coping mechanism? Is it a little bit of both or either depending on the day? The answers to those questions are personal, but if I’ve learned anything about melding your creative outlets with your lived experience (and your process for coping with these) — boundaries aren’t only encouraged, they’re necessary.

Starting to set them today, whether you’re just starting your creative pursuit or years into it, will help you find a more balanced form of artistry in the long run. It’ll also ensure that you don’t burnout and add fuel to any fire of hard lived moments that you may already be going through.

Boundaries within your creative outlet can look like:

• Determining audiences you will and won’t share with
• Writing down topics that you’re comfortable speaking about and topics that are only for you to explore alone
• Deciding how often you will choose to share content publicly
• Setting check-in dates for yourself every so often so that you know where you stand, what’s working, and what isn’t