Last month, while spring cleaning my home-based office, I faced off with a bookshelf full of past writing journals.

Get rid of them (I coaxed myself). Whatever you wrote here is history now.

My inner packrat resisted. Couldn’t I just box them up and move them to the basement to join all those other journals that, together, chronicle my three-plus decades of living in the United States?

One gray-covered notebook with pink post-it notes caught my eye. It was dated January 2017 to December 2017. Ah. Yes. That was the year of my husband’s multiple health scares and more than one surgery.

Back then, at age 54, I commuted to a suburban office building, where I worked a busy health communications job. So how the heck had I all this time to journal about my and my husband’s medical visits–some emergency–to facilities where (I think) I presented as the engaged and supportive spouse?

Now, as I read through some of my old journal entries, I saw that I was full of rage back then.

I rarely share my private or expressive writing, but here’s an excerpt:

“The truth is that I’m angry as hell. It makes no sense to be angry at happenstance, at the vicissitudes of the molecular or cellular. But I am.”

Other dated entries assumed that the rest of America’s estimated 53 million unpaid family caregivers were doing this caregiving and spousal thing “much better” than me. The writing had a sense of transgression—that my early-morning writing was stealing time from important stuff, like food prep and work, and making sure my husband had everything he needed.

Now, seven years on, I could quit this pack-rat decluttering standoff to sit at my home office workstation to research and write an article on spousal or family caregiving–especially when it arrives much sooner than we’ve presumed or expected. But I don’t need research to tell me this: Even when we seem like we’re coping, most or all of us caregivers would swap the new-normal realities for our old-normal (read: our family member is healthy) life.

Here’s another journal snippet:

“I am also angry at the stealth and secrecy of it all, the odd mystery of our bodies, beating, thumping, thudding, dividing, clogging, or chugging with no outward or real-time indication that something is beginning to stop or start.”

In retrospect, this “naughty” or subversive feeling shouldn’t have surprised me. As a 14-year-old student in my native Ireland, I began to write in a journal when I was ostensibly doing evening homework. Back then, I wrote because I was exhausted by the rote-learning world of my convent girls’ school. I wrote to mitigate a sense of being perpetually overseen and unseen. This youthful journaling continued into my Dublin college years and my early years in America.

Now, a funny thing happened in my 2017 journal pages. Just before the midpoint, my entries began to track from rage to self-analysis to humility. Some entries echoed what surgeon and best-selling author Atul Gawande says about his private writings: “My chance to write is a chance to make sense of what I’m seeing and to understand the problem.” He adds: “Writing has been my way to understand and recognize what I got right and what I got wrong.”

Later in my journal, I saw that beneath all that rage pulsed a heart-thumping fear. Still later, I listed some ideas to mitigate that fear.

These days, I’m glad to report that my husband’s medical issues have been operated on, medicated, and stabilized—though the clinical visits extended well into 2018 and 2019 and all the way up to last summer. These days, ugly as my old rage rants read to me now, I understand that there was no shortcut from raw emotion to self-discovery and, finally, to mercy.

In 2020, after I lost my job due to COVID layoffs, a local cancer recovery group invited me to lead some virtual expressive writing workshops for their members who, like many of us, were now homebound. Four years on, I’m in a new, hospital-based day job and also leading writing workshops for patient, public, and clinician groups. This work feels like a privilege, not a job. However, at least until now, I have never outed myself about those rage writes.

For my husband’s last surgery, I didn’t feel so rear-ended or flustered. So maybe age and a pandemic have mellowed me. Or in 2017, maybe the writing did for my cyclonic emotions what this year’s bout of office spring cleaning would—I hoped—do for my brain and work productivity.

James Pennebaker, PhD, an American social psychologist and professor, was one of the first U.S. researchers to study the impact of short writing stints. In this recent interview with the American Psychological Association, Pennebaker says, “When there are bad things, writing for me helps me get through them.”

Since Pennebaker’s first study (1986), researchers have conducted over 300 clinical studies–including literature reviews–on the efficacy of emotional or expressive writing. Study groups have ranged from American college freshmen to Italian health care clinicians, recently laid-off workers, and stressed-out medical students. The outcomes data mostly support the benefits of short (two—to fifteen-minute) writing stints.

“But it’s not a cure-all,” says a health writer for Harvard Medical School. The writer adds: “Expressive writing appears to be more effective for people who are not also struggling with ongoing or severe mental health challenges, such as major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.”

So back to my office spring cleaning. As I dithered between shredding or basement-moving my old journals, I posed myself Marie Kondo’s classic decluttering question: “Has all this writing—including the rage writes—brought me joy?” Oh, yes.

Aine M. Greaney is a writer and can be reached at her self-titled site, Aine Greaney.