On the Freeing of the Mind.
I began thinking about the magic that lay in writing when a friend of mine, one who hardly reads books, let alone actually writing about the inner workings of his mind, showed me what he had written and spoke of the relief he felt as the words had escaped from his fingertips.
“I remembered what you had told me, so I just started jotting down my thoughts. First in my phone, then later on in my laptop. It was effortless and it felt strangely good.”
I know. It does. That is why I use the phrasing “pouring it out” so goddamned often, because that is precisely how it feels.
Now, what I had told him was this: when you feel like your heart can’t quite take life for a bit, when the going gets too tough, when your mind is working against you and you are hurt by the thoughts that keep on looping through your brain, just write it out.
To take the pressure off your wounds and let the blood-soaked words flow out freely. That is writing.
It’s the simplest piece of advice I have & the one I am most comfortable giving out, because it’s one of the few things that I fully and unchangeably believe in.
It is simple and it’s curative. Because allowing our thoughts to take shape on a piece of paper gives us the space to distance ourselves from the Chaos troubling our minds. To look at it as someone who isn’t so intimately attached to it. It gives us space to breathe in between the cycles that our minds inevitably seem to live in.
The writing itself needn’t be groundbreaking or any good, necessarily. But it’ll likely make you feel pretty rad. Or at least a little lighter.
It’s about the act of taking the time to sit down with your thoughts and to do something with them. Which for me means taking my notebook to a quiet place and allowing every single word that wants to come out to find its place on the paper. Sometimes it becomes a list. Sometimes it’s a paragraph describing how I feel. Sometimes it’s a three-page chronicling of what has taken place in the days before.
Sometimes there is art to it and sometimes it hardly makes any sense at all.
Let’s simply let it be whatever it wants to be and find comfort in the momentary calm that comes from balancing the Order and Chaos that live inside of us all.
