Writing Has Kept Me Alive at Times I Didn’t Want To Be Living
I think we have all had dark moments in our lives. These moments that leave us feeling isolated and alone. Even as seas of people swarm around us moving on with their life, it’s almost as if we stand in the center watching them ebb and flow around us.
I used to ask myself, “How can all of these people be moving on? How is this possible to get get over some things?”
In reality, we never get over the pain and the hurt inflicted on us, we just learn how to mask it. We learn how to better cope in a life with it. The truth of the matter is, we can never live without whatever happened to us anymore. They are permanent residents in our minds, freeloading on the couch, eating all of our food, not paying rent…
One of the only ways I’ve managed to cope with these roommates is with writing.
In initially writing this I was going to apologize for this being a sappy post. I was going to defend it and say that it wasn’t going to be about how writing has saved my life… Because how could something so simple, so benign save a person’s life — save something so fragile and so big at the same time? How could a simple craft resurrect the person inside that was lying dormant in a husk of skin and bone — someone that was so ready to give up?
Well you know what? Writing saved me. And that’s freaking awesome.
For those of you that have experienced this magic, all I can really say is that it did. It just did. And you know what I mean by that…
Writing saved my modestly, quietly, and without the attempt of attention and fanfare. It worked it’s silent magic, transforming my self-defeating thoughts into beautiful art.
I’m not going to apologize for this being a sappy post, because I don’t need to. It is a sappy post and that’s okay.
Writing has, at it’s very core, truly saved my life.
When I initially began writing I wrote in a composition notebook. I wrote to understand myself. I had started with the idea of talking about my feelers then soon realized that when I opened myself up to that, I would vomit all over the page making very little sense of it — it was blinding emotion just sprayed all over in blue and black ink.
I also found that instead of being able to constructively evaluate myself, I was just venting.
That’s not all bad. I believe that venting is effective and even important in the stages of realization — the stages of obtaining a new level of self-awareness. The problem with venting, though, is that often it is truly unhelpful unless it is followed up with something encouraging and useful.
I soon realized that after venting for several journal entries, I was getting no where. I realized nothing, other that what truly irked me.
So. I did what any writer does… I gave myself guidelines, a prompt to respond to.
Every time I wrote I had to answer five main points. I discovered that by answering these five questions I was able to shape my thinking and change from anger to constructive solutions.
The questions I asked myself were:
- How am I feeling? Can I place an emotion to my mood?
- How is my body feeling? What is my body feeling? What is my body currently telling me?
- How might question one and two be related?
- What patterns am I seeing in my life? How are people reacting to me?
- Anything else I would like to add/ vent about?
By the time I got to question five I had already sorted out exactly how I felt, why I got that way, and how the world might be seeing me.
Question four was ALWAYS a critical one and it must be asked when increasing self-awareness.
The reason is, the world has a way of mirroring how we present and project ourselves. It’s that whole ‘you get back what you put in’ mantra. If people are being rude to me, what was I doing to facilitate their rudeness?
What was the common denominator?
Well, the answer was always me.
Beyond just writing for constructive means — to find a purpose and intensify myself — it became a creative outlet. I began my first novel. I found something to look forward to.
Writing was the hand that grabbed me when I was so close to jumping off that metaphorical cliff. It was the voice that stopped me, that reminded me I was important even if I was only important to myself.
I write to save others, to help others. But most importantly I write to save myself.
Thank you for your time, your support, and for being a part of my journey!
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