An autistic perspective on freewriting and how it can help us improve creativity, explore identity, and even improve physical and emotional health. This episode was a bit of an experiment. While it was fun sharing information, future episodes will be more conversation and based mostly on my personal experience (as opposed to research). I wanted to share the following resources that I used to prep for this episode:Psychological Benefits of Free Writing.Therapeutic Journaling PDFI also referred to Expressive Writing by James W. Pennebaker and John Frank Evans. And Tony Attwood's book The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome. Both should be available from your local library or elsewhere via interlibrary loan. If you like this content, please follow and / or share!Episode 2 Transcript:If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can read the full transcript by viewing this episode at AutisticPOV.com. Closed captioning is available via the website or on the podbean app.0:03Welcome to Autistic POV. My name is Barbara Graver. I am a late diagnosed autistic, and I hope you'll join me as we talk about life, identity, and self-acceptance from an autistic point of view. Today, I wanted to talk about free writing. And free writing is to essentially just start writing and to keep writing.0:29And it's a stream of consciousness thing where you jot down whatever comes into your head. And one of the reasons I want to talk about this is because I'm doing it right now. And I've been toying with the idea of writing like an autism memoir for a long time, and it's very hard for me to do.0:46So I thought maybe the free writing would help. And I think it is. It's early days, but I think it is. So the main things I wanted to cover about free writing, I have three points I'd like to make about free writing. And I do have references for each of these.1:01Those will be in the show notes because this is a short podcast. I'm not going to be taking a real deep dive. So if you want to learn more, I'm going to give you the references that I used and hopefully they would answer1:13some of your questions or at least get you started on your own research if this resonates. So the first, the three topics I want to talk about are free writing and increased creativity. Free writing as a way to explore identity and and free writing and the potential for healing.1:32And you could do a whole podcast probably on each of these, but I just want to give a little bit of an overview. So increased creativity. There was a study that was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology on free writing and creativity. I actually couldn't read the study because it was paywalled,1:51but I did find a website that talked about it. So that's what I'll be linking to in the description. But the gist of it is that the study showed that people who did free writing had increased innovation and creativity. And this is something that I think a lot of people already know.2:09I mean, there's the artist's way, there's various things about journaling and how it helps. But I think a lot of people haven't actually tried it. I mean, we know it'll probably work, but we don't really want to put the time in. And that's understandable. I mean, I kind of feel that way too.2:26So one of the things I've done is I've limited it to 20 minutes. I have a timer and I recommend, I love my timer. I have a timer that when you turn it, it's actually, I'm not sure how to describe this, but as you turn it, it's a colored timer.2:43It shows a colored wedge of how much time you have left. So every time you look at it, you could see that time going down. And it's very helpful. I find it very helpful. So one of the strategies is to just do a set amount of time. And with free writing,2:59a lot of times people think free writing is just writing whatever comes into your head. And it's not necessarily. You can pick a topic. Particularly if you're, and we'll discuss a couple different kinds of topics, but if you're dealing with a creative issue, you could start writing something about that, definitely.3:18Or, you know, you could write something unrelated and just see what kind of pops in. And autistic people tend to be very, very creative. But we also tend to have a lot of issues around creativity. And I'm going to talk about that, just that, in another episode. But I think if you're autistic, you're probably creative.3:39And if you're autistic and creative, you probably already know this. And we can get in a loop with our creativity. And there are a lot of negative things that could come in, like perfectionism and self-censoring and judging ourselves that can really get us all tangled up. Or at least that's been my experience with writing.4:02Been writing all my life, but I've never published anything. I've rarely even showed my writing to people. And so it's not surprising that we have reservations and feel conflicted. And I think that journaling can be a way to recover from this. It's a way that we can kind of regain our center with our creativity.4:25And if you've read The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, she was essentially in creative burnout when she started the process. So it helped her, and it's helped a lot of people. But also what I find with journaling, and I also use dreams this way, but just sticking with journaling,4:44is that I get ideas when I journal, even when I'm not journaling about my writing or about my work. And this is why with free writing, you can pick any topic or no topic. And whatever you pick, it's very likely that while you're doing it, because you're in kind of a flow state,5:03That something will just pop in. It's kind of like the way you get ideas when you're in the shower, except you're writing. So you just write it down. You just add it in. That's what I do. Like I'll be writing about an experience or I'll pick a topic.5:17of some kind and all of a sudden an idea pops in and I just include that, put a little asterisk by it and I come back to it. So that is one way and it is a proven way. It's evidence-based way to increase creativity and innovation and you do not have to write about your project.5:34You can write about whatever you want and you'll still get that effect. So that's the first one, increased creativity. That's the first benefit. The second one is that free writing can be a way to explore identity. You just write about anything, and it could be experience that pertains to identity, certainly. It could be your special interests.5:56A lot of us, we get our identity from our special interests. So this is something we can explore. One of my special interest going all the way back to childhood was vampires. I was always very interested in vampires and gothic fiction. And I could trace this all the way back,6:13like I grew up in the 60s and 70s, so I could trace this all the way back to the TV show Dark Shadows and the main character Angelique. And there were reasons why At that point in my life, I identified with this.6:27And through the free writing, I could see why grade school was very, very hard for me. And there was a reason why a powerful, beautiful, exotic witch like Angelique would appeal to me and why the whole world of Collinwood and stuff was kind of escaped from me.6:46So the same thing with books, like along that line, I always like gothic fiction. So this is a way that we shape our identity because oftentimes our special interests kind of become our identity. And this is something that happens with neurotypicals too. Somebody will be like their job, like they're a lawyer. That's who they are.7:06For us, it might be we have a certain interest and there's nothing wrong with that. Tony Atwood in his book on Asperger's, which I'll also link to, kind of like an old book, a little out of date, but still he makes some good points, I think.7:21And one thing he says about Asperger's, I always want to make that a B, is that identity is an issue. Identity is an issue for autistics. It just is. We don't have that strong sense of central coherence that neurotypi

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