Such A Waste

My local big city paper carried an article last week called Writing Reduces Stress. I'd known that writing can have a positive effect on people emotionally, but I'd never heard that type of writing given a name as it is in this article--expressive writing.

"And what do you do with your text when you are finished?" the author asks at the end of his own piece of writing. "Shred it, burn it, delete it."

What!? Throw writing away? All I could think of was that if I wrote about the most miserably unhappy events of my life, I would finish, look down at my paper, and say to myself, "There's got to be some way I can use this stuff."