“Anything and everything can be art!” is, I feel, a deceptively sinister phrase. You could substitute the rather generic “art” in this situation with your medium of choice, be it poetry, film, literature, or what have you, and the situation remains unchanged. It seems innocuous at first, even encouraging. Anything can be art; no matter how lost you may feel, no matter what vision you lack, your expression has merit. You exist and you are valid. As someone who has spent more time than perhaps he’d like to admit pacing fretfully to and fro, hyperventilating into a McDonald’s bag because the words don’t sound the way they’re supposed to, I understand. Writing is a painful, clumsy, often fruitless task, so positive affirmation is as valuable as it is rare. But there’s a danger in creating that sense of comfort, tossing standards by the wayside in favor of blind positivity and confidence. The idea that everything, every single careless, thoughtless, witless, messy, wishy-washy, meandering, pointless thing is art gives me pause.

Here’s an example from one of my negative passages: “My retainer might actually be messing up my teeth. When I open and close my mouth, my bottom teeth seem out of line, slightly to the right, as compared with my top teeth. I really don’t feel like going to the fucking orthodontist again, though.”

I awoke and felt my retainer askew in my mouth, so that was on my mind as I turned to open my notebook for the morning. It also got me thinking about my slightly crooked jaw, which plunged me headfirst into a morning soliloquy about my physical flaws, not wanting to go to the orthodontist, and other overly critical analyses of my being.

I know this sounds like a slippery slope to suicide by starting each morning like this, but I’ve found it to be mentally freeing. By writing down the swirls of activity, from worry to lust to elation, that echo through my mind each day, I can work towards the maintenance of a level-head and semi-clear mind throughout the rest of my day. Think of it as the writer’s form of meditation or kundalini yoga.

Other Morning Pages passages have been more neutral: “My 7th birthday. In the front living room. It was sunny outside. Some of my classmates were there. A magician performed. He took my grandmother’s ring, wrapped it into a napkin, set the napkin on fire, threw the flaming mass into the air, it poofed into smoke, and then he removed the ring from his inside pocket. Still don’t know how he did that.”

Whether it’s mystical memories or body-image problems, Morning Pages allow me to purge. As Cameron says, putting these thoughts on the page stops them from “eddying through your consciousness throughout the day.” It’s easy to let thoughts become our reality, but putting them down on paper works paradoxically to make them both more and less real. More, in the sense that they’re in a physical form that others can potentially come across. Less, in that they’ve been quantified and explained in intelligible (semi, hopefully) scrawls that are less daunting to confront than the mystifying babble of self-talk.
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​I think that’s what a lot of my best writing does: it exposes my inner darkness to the page, freeing it from the mine of my mind like the Chilean spelunkers. I can handle handwritten words—challenge their accuracy, continue writing until I uncover their source. I’m a writer. It’s my therapy.

​If something as simple as three handwritten pages can ebb the tide and lessen the roar of background noise swirling in the depths of my skull, then count me and my bedside notebook in.
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By Juliana Crescenzo
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I was lying in bed, my covers clung to my body; I was their prisoner. Three hours had passed since my alarm clock went off and I still wasn’t able to will my body to get up and be productive. My list of things to do became longer every day and I was stressed out beyond belief, but I could not move from that bed.

As a society, we tend to sweep mental health under the rug because it’s easier than talking about about it. When we give names to our monsters—Depression, Anxiety, Bipolar Disorder, Eating Disorders, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—they become real and alive, and are no longer just the Albatrosses we’ve been secretly struggling to carry in our minds. When it comes to mental health, either you are recovering, you are relapsing, or you are dying.