Julian asks "What brings you to the writing table?" while Nicholas states "writing and drawing are not just about drawing and writing. They are seriously helpful therapy..."
In my experience writing can be both therapy and trigger. Writing has a way of getting to the truth, the real truth, with or without your abettance. That truth can affect or even haunt you for years.
Writing is hard, you wouldn't think so but there you go. Still, I am inexorably drawn to it like the proverbial moth to the flame, whether or not it is in my best interests.
I may take breaks, sometimes extended, but I always return. It's something about the expression, connection, communication that writing enables, with yourself as much as with others. It is so much more than just putting words on the page or screen – it may sound overly dramatic but writing is a reflection of life itself.
That is what brings me to the table.
I find writing helpful, and I've started daily journalling this year, but because I do it all day long (for a job), it sometimes wears me out. It takes a lot of thinking.
Drawing (and painting) on the other hand has been like therapy for me because it totally switches of that part of my brain that tends to ruminate on stuff and weigh me down. :)
It's like the plumber who spends all day fixing other people's pipes but when they get home the last thing they want to do is fix their own leak. Writing and drawing/painting are two sides of the same coin, two different approaches to the same end.