My first attempts at writing (outside of school papers) were shot down harshly by everyone in my family.
I was in middle school - I had grown up with an old brother who used to kick my ass often - not anything crazy just the regular older brother business. He had a nasty habit of making me cry and watching me cry, just to hit me again when I stopped. That's the worst thing I can remember - he hit me just hard enough so I would cry some more - and then he would lecture me about respect. I felt stuck. My parents would usually punish us both when I complained so I usually stopped telling on him. He also made it routine to apologize before they came home and try to make it up to me. I was stuck. That's when I wrote my first blog. My first article was about how much I hated my brother, what he did to me, and how I felt. It was a poorly compiled list of events with interjections about my feelings. I sent it out to a few friends from school - and my brother. I wanted to show him that what he did would not go unnoticed, that people would know, and that there was a record of it online - for all to see.
I didn't think much of it through - I was young, and I was probably crying as I was writing that hateful thing.
By the end of the day my brother had read it. He must have felt terrible. He might have cried. But eventually told my parents. The rest was a resolution in the way that was very common with my parents - a denial of conflict. They explained to me that publishing such a personal thing was wrong. That others shouldn't know what conflicts go on inside the family, and that I should take down my posts immediately and make up with my brother. I did. You can imagine the rest.
The point I'm trying to make is that I wrote out of necessity. As a cry for help, and more importantly for feedback. I wanted someone to tell me their story, give me a tip, or share my pain by identifying with me. I got those things - the benefits were immediate. So immediate that by the time the story got to my parents and the way they talked to me made me feel that I was the agressor. they argued that because I didn't feel hurt anymore it didn't matter that I was hurt previously. But it worked - I felt guilty for ever writing those posts, I felt I betrayed my brother, and I took them down.