Every nasty thought and unhappy sentiment and confused opinion and unsubstantiated anger and unrelenting joy that I hadn't felt in days suddenly broke some dam in my mind and flooded my brain. I couldn't physically take another step under the weight of the thoughts that were exponentially growing in my mind. I needed to release them somehow; I needed to sort through them and understand them and uncover why I'd felt so lost all week.
I was walking alongside a small park just then, a place I'd run through before. There were large, polished boulders carved to look like birds and a thin row of hedges that just dampened the sounds of eight lanes of traffic flying past on the other side. I perched on the largest of the stone birds,a red one, and pulled out my notebook. Fittingly, I'd run out of journal pages just the night before and had already anticipated using my work notebook as a temporary journal for the last 18 days of travel.
There was a couple behind me on a bench; the man stared blankly out at people rushing by on their way home from work and the woman performed a tiny, tasty version of STOMP with her chopsticks and a bowl of noodles: click, click, slurp, sniffle. click, click, slurp, sniffle.
With pen dangling over the page, I waited for words to come. I knew that if I could put all the thoughts and emotions swarming around my head into coherent sentences, and if I could get those coherent sentences onto paper, I could be free of them. But keeping my head above the roaring waves of my thoughts was hard enough; forming coherent sentences seemed impossible.
So, I imagined taking my hands into my own hands, and crouching down to look into my own green eyes, and employing my best 'nice teacher' voice to tell myself, "I know this is hard, Kelly, but you need to use your words." And, employing a strategy I'd taught myself back in Peru when I was in the midst of a particularly confusing day, I began to disentangle and name my feelings.
"I feel frustrated because..."
"I am confused about..."
"I'm excited that I..."
"I'm so grateful to..."
"I'm a little sad that..."
"I feel guilty because..."
And on and on.
I've written in a journal almost everyday since November 1, 2012, the day I moved to Peru. That's over three and a half years of chronicling everything from the trivial to the life-changing. When I'm particularly busy, I might find that I go a week without writing, but then I'll force myself to jot down a little something from each of the days that I missed. Even if don't write everyday, I write something about (almost) every day.
I thought it would be good to hold myself accountable to daily reflection: I would recount a small victory or cherish some beauty or relive a moment of celebration. "[That student who is typically a tyrant] actually participated today, he loved the game and hugged me after class!" or "Amazing dinner with the community tonight, so much laughter over Allie's story, then we practiced Olympic race walking in the kitchen." Making myself recognize at least one great or powerful moment in the day did have the ability to transform my thinking. I might still go to bed with my head racing from the things I'd done wrong that day or concentrating on the epic "To Do" list of the next day, but somewhere in that burdened mind, there was a tiny, glimmering star of gratitude.
But I've gotten away from that more and more. My accounts of each day have moved towards a list of things I accomplished, or an account of how I spent my hours being productive (or unproductive) rather than an account of how I felt or what I learned.
Most of the time, it's something like: "Had a good run, nice sunrise, lots of people out. Went to work - finished the spreadsheet! Boss was impressed. Played frisbee, ehhhh, I didn't play well but the team won. So tired... why am I still awake at 1 AM?" Nothing too thrilling.
When I read back through my journals, there are some gems in the laundry list accounts of each day. The fact that I was writing mere bullet points in a stream of consciousness style made the pronouncements I wrote all the more hilarious. "Got accepted to Stanford!!!!!!!!" was sandwiched between "food poisoning, felt like dying all morning" and "bathroom is so dirty again. passive aggressive note time?" Sometimes I sounded like a teenager in a Judy Blume novel. "Caught up with Alisha for over an hour. She's the best, great advice as always. I love her so much!"
My journal is also riddled with phrases about someone who, luckily, finds my emotionally-distant commentary endearing. (Including what I wrote after our first date: "he's not as cute in person or as tall as I thought he'd be, but we had great conversations." I don't think that anymore, for the record. He's adorable and 6 feet tall, but I can't take it back entirely... I wrote it in pen.)
Ninety percent of the time, my journal is a blubbering mess of sentence fragments and scrawled commitments to "not eat so much junk food" and "get more sleep!" Five percent of the time, my journal is home to quotes from books or accounts of really strange dreams I had the night before. The last five percent of the time, though, that journal is the only thing preventing me from bursting into tears and wandering barefoot around a gas station searching for ice cream. Not that I don't eventually cry and/or eat ice cream. It's just that, in my unyielding perfectionism, I force myself to finish writing in my journal before I'm allowed to attend to the rest of my imminent emotional breakdown.
Unsurprisingly, by the time I've finished writing, I typically find the distress has subsided, the constriction in my chest has eased (but the desire to eat ice cream remains). It's why I won't ever let anyone read my journals: there are nasty, judgmental, and rude things written about a lot of people and situations. I might feel those things momentarily, but, the second I've written the thoughts down, I can release myself from being manipulated or affected by them anymore. It's cathartic. It's also horrifying to imagine anyone ever reading them. (Please burn my journals when I'm gone. You will find no sketches of fantastical futuristic machines, or the secret ingredients to a family recipe, or clues that may lead you to buried treasure; burn the journals.)
So, I kept asking myself, "And how does that make you feel?" and I kept naming my feelings. I was almost okay again.
I was walking alongside a small park just then, a place I'd run through before. There were large, polished boulders carved to look like birds and a thin row of hedges that just dampened the sounds of eight lanes of traffic flying past on the other side. I perched on the largest of the stone birds,a red one, and pulled out my notebook. Fittingly, I'd run out of journal pages just the night before and had already anticipated using my work notebook as a temporary journal for the last 18 days of travel.
There was a couple behind me on a bench; the man stared blankly out at people rushing by on their way home from work and the woman performed a tiny, tasty version of STOMP with her chopsticks and a bowl of noodles: click, click, slurp, sniffle. click, click, slurp, sniffle.
With pen dangling over the page, I waited for words to come. I knew that if I could put all the thoughts and emotions swarming around my head into coherent sentences, and if I could get those coherent sentences onto paper, I could be free of them. But keeping my head above the roaring waves of my thoughts was hard enough; forming coherent sentences seemed impossible.
So, I imagined taking my hands into my own hands, and crouching down to look into my own green eyes, and employing my best 'nice teacher' voice to tell myself, "I know this is hard, Kelly, but you need to use your words." And, employing a strategy I'd taught myself back in Peru when I was in the midst of a particularly confusing day, I began to disentangle and name my feelings.
"I feel frustrated because..."
"I am confused about..."
"I'm excited that I..."
"I'm so grateful to..."
"I'm a little sad that..."
"I feel guilty because..."
And on and on.
I've written in a journal almost everyday since November 1, 2012, the day I moved to Peru. That's over three and a half years of chronicling everything from the trivial to the life-changing. When I'm particularly busy, I might find that I go a week without writing, but then I'll force myself to jot down a little something from each of the days that I missed. Even if don't write everyday, I write something about (almost) every day.
I thought it would be good to hold myself accountable to daily reflection: I would recount a small victory or cherish some beauty or relive a moment of celebration. "[That student who is typically a tyrant] actually participated today, he loved the game and hugged me after class!" or "Amazing dinner with the community tonight, so much laughter over Allie's story, then we practiced Olympic race walking in the kitchen." Making myself recognize at least one great or powerful moment in the day did have the ability to transform my thinking. I might still go to bed with my head racing from the things I'd done wrong that day or concentrating on the epic "To Do" list of the next day, but somewhere in that burdened mind, there was a tiny, glimmering star of gratitude.
But I've gotten away from that more and more. My accounts of each day have moved towards a list of things I accomplished, or an account of how I spent my hours being productive (or unproductive) rather than an account of how I felt or what I learned.
Most of the time, it's something like: "Had a good run, nice sunrise, lots of people out. Went to work - finished the spreadsheet! Boss was impressed. Played frisbee, ehhhh, I didn't play well but the team won. So tired... why am I still awake at 1 AM?" Nothing too thrilling.
When I read back through my journals, there are some gems in the laundry list accounts of each day. The fact that I was writing mere bullet points in a stream of consciousness style made the pronouncements I wrote all the more hilarious. "Got accepted to Stanford!!!!!!!!" was sandwiched between "food poisoning, felt like dying all morning" and "bathroom is so dirty again. passive aggressive note time?" Sometimes I sounded like a teenager in a Judy Blume novel. "Caught up with Alisha for over an hour. She's the best, great advice as always. I love her so much!"
My journal is also riddled with phrases about someone who, luckily, finds my emotionally-distant commentary endearing. (Including what I wrote after our first date: "he's not as cute in person or as tall as I thought he'd be, but we had great conversations." I don't think that anymore, for the record. He's adorable and 6 feet tall, but I can't take it back entirely... I wrote it in pen.)
Ninety percent of the time, my journal is a blubbering mess of sentence fragments and scrawled commitments to "not eat so much junk food" and "get more sleep!" Five percent of the time, my journal is home to quotes from books or accounts of really strange dreams I had the night before. The last five percent of the time, though, that journal is the only thing preventing me from bursting into tears and wandering barefoot around a gas station searching for ice cream. Not that I don't eventually cry and/or eat ice cream. It's just that, in my unyielding perfectionism, I force myself to finish writing in my journal before I'm allowed to attend to the rest of my imminent emotional breakdown.
Unsurprisingly, by the time I've finished writing, I typically find the distress has subsided, the constriction in my chest has eased (but the desire to eat ice cream remains). It's why I won't ever let anyone read my journals: there are nasty, judgmental, and rude things written about a lot of people and situations. I might feel those things momentarily, but, the second I've written the thoughts down, I can release myself from being manipulated or affected by them anymore. It's cathartic. It's also horrifying to imagine anyone ever reading them. (Please burn my journals when I'm gone. You will find no sketches of fantastical futuristic machines, or the secret ingredients to a family recipe, or clues that may lead you to buried treasure; burn the journals.)
So, I kept asking myself, "And how does that make you feel?" and I kept naming my feelings. I was almost okay again.
No comments:
Post a Comment