The Simple Exercise That Can Help Untangle Your Life

When life got tough for Cynthia Bond, she found an outlet through writing. "It is the reason I am here," she says. "At times, I felt that my mind, my spirit, all of it was like a fine gold necklace, and it was tangled. It was too tangled to ever parse apart. I never saw how I was going to be able to do that. But I wrote. I just wrote." That writing led to Ruby, the latest selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0.

Regardless of whether you want to be a writer, Cynthia says, putting the words of your life on a page is cathartic and therapeutic. Once the words are on the page, she says, negative thoughts can leave your body. "And that's why the young people I've worked with for so many years, very few of them have dreams of publishing a book," she says. "But once they put it on the page, they are able to identify their life and see their lives."

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