Using Creative Nonfiction to Retake Control of Your Mind

By Mackenzie Mathieu

Liza McDonough, a junior at the George Washington University, uses creative storytelling to feel more in control of her mental health conditions, identifying her childhood tales of a monster in the mirror as a physical manifestation of her challenges. 

Within the last 6 months, McDonough was diagnosed and medicated for anxiety, ADHD, depression, and OCD, leading her to reevaluate the way she has dealt with her mental health. Creatively writing about her experiences helped McDonough feel more agency in her life, especially when the aspects of her brain she did not understand started to take over. 

“I always kind of realized that the demon is always scarier if you don't know what it is,” said McDonough. “I wrote this character overcoming it, and it helped me realize how I can overcome it too.”

In her middle school years, McDonough and her best friend created a story about a girl who refused to look in a mirror. In the story, the girl’s reflection would shift into a monster that would crawl out of the reflection and chase after her. Though this story was a fantasy, McDonough also refused to look in the mirror in her tween years, after being teased at school. 

McDonough explains that writing this story helped her feel more in control of her own mind. She thinks she was better able to persist against this imaginary monster in the mirror than against the abstract concepts of her mental health. Now, McDonough looks back at this story as one of the ways she supported herself, finding community with this fictional character.

Cat Thomson, McDonough’s stepmother, also feels as though she understands her stepdaughter better through reading her stories. McDonough has been open to sharing her thoughts and feelings with her family for most of her life, but in the stories, Thomson can understand struggles that are challenging to verbalize. Since she was young, McDonough’s fiction has revolved around advanced themes and telling stories with meaning sitting beneath the surface. 

“Even though she might be writing about fictional characters, there’s always her personality in there,” Thomson says. “And it’s very interesting and fun to engage with that and see what and how she thinks and what her ideas are.”

Annie Liontas, author and associate professor of writing at the George Washington University, focuses on the importance of using storytelling to represent real-world experiences. Currently teaching a class on Creative Nonfiction, Liontas combines their creative work with their lived experience to help themself process emotion-filled moments. Like Liontas, McDonough started writing because of an internal drive to express herself, using the story as both self-discovery and self-expression. 

“Initially, it was to burn the story out of me,” Liontas says regarding writing their memoir, through which they sparked a supportive online community. This sentiment mirrors McDonough’s description of why imagining the monster was so pivotal in her childhood. 

McDonough’s mental health conditions also give her skills she uses to enhance her writing abilities. Through her creative nonfiction, McDonough has discovered that her brain’s unique processing gives her advantages that others do not have. 

“My imagination is very, very active,” McDonough says. “That's part of ADHD. It's like my brain is always thinking of different situations and scenarios.” 

Writing her thoughts down helps her ground herself and stay in the present when her mind feels hectic. As McDonough increasingly understands how much writing things down benefits her brain, she is developing techniques that aid her productivity and calm. 

One way she does this is through her daily journal, where she writes the date, the weather, and a to-do list where she checks things off as they occur. She also leaves a section to write her thoughts about the day and process her emotions. The consistency of completing this journal supports McDonough in staying organized and regulated. 

In addition, her stepmother, Thomson, has noticed McDonough scribbling down numbers as they watch television or do other mindless activities. The act of writing something down on paper, even if it does not have much obvious meaning, visibly calms her down. 

Her writing is a helpful coping strategy that helps with processing her emotions about her mental health, but the major shift in her productivity and calm came from medical regulation. McDonough has experienced drastic differences in the way she feels after getting on the correct medication. 

“I used to be so anxious all the time, but it's been so calming,” McDonough says. 

McDonough plans to use her creativity to become a fashion journalist, combining two of her passions into her career. She hopes to continue incorporating the coping strategies she has learned throughout her life to prepare her to be confident in herself and her mental health going forward. 

“It's just a big learning process and learning what works for you,” McDonough says. “But once you figure it out, it's life-changing.”