You know how I’m always banging on about how writing helps you be better about recognising your feelings and doing useful things with them?
Well, today I would like to cop to a big fail on that front.
Over the weekend I got absolutely flattened by homesickness and Covid fatigue, and hand to God, I did not see either of them coming… even though it was all right there in what I’d been writing.
For the past few months I have been journalling and meditating more consistently than I ever have in my whole life, and STILL I got blindsided by these very big, definitely-brewing-a-long-time feelings.
I mean, literally last week I wrote about using writing to avoid having your feelings sneak up on you.
Now I can see that my writing was trying to tell me something, and I wasn’t having it.
Flipping through journal entries for the past few weeks, it’s all there — days and days of skimming over it all, pages and pages of writing about everything else. Even when those feelings did break the surface, I wrote them away, refusing to let them take up any more space.
The human brain is amazing at skirting around painful, uncomfortable things. Even when you’re trying to deal with everything consciously, your subconscious will herd you away from the hard stuff.
Writing can’t guarantee that your brain won’t shut you off from stuff that needs your attention, or that you won’t have big feelings. It can’t guarantee that you’ll never be blindsided, or that you’ll always be able to see what’s coming.
But what it can guarantee is a safe space to work through those feelings.
Even if they’ve taken you by surprise, writing lets you deal with them on your own terms. There’s no one there to rush you, and you can write whatever the hell you want to let it all move through you.
The page is always there for you, waiting for you to be there for yourself.