The other night I was up having one of my periodic nocturnal crying jags.
I tried to stay in bed and go back to sleep but eventually got up and wrote for a few hours. About the crying jag and the not sleeping. Maybe you read about it.
After a few hours, I went back to bed. Just as I was falling asleep, I had a thought. It was cold in the house, and warm under the covers, so I didn’t particularly welcome the thought. It was 0400. I wanted to sleep, not think. I tried to cajole the thought into going away by telling it I’d remember to write it down when I woke up. The thought wasn’t going to fall for my pathetic tricks, so I grabbed the nearest electronic device and wrote it down so it would shut up and leave me alone.
My technophiliac version of a scrawled note.
It said:
Ride it out=
Write it out
Since I wrote it on a keyboard, I could even read what it said the next day. The miracle of technology saves me from my own bad handwriting once again.
I had just ridden out a bad spell by writing it out. It is what I do. Either ride things out or write them out. Or both.
Some people can talk it out. I can’t do that. I am almost entirely literate and essentially non-verbal. Can you use literate like that? Verbally non-expressive, but able to write my feelings ? There must be a better word for it than that. I wonder what it is? I wonder what it is. Great. I am officially not only non-verbal but only marginally better equipped to express myself in writing.
Regardless of what the word for expressing thoughts and feelings better in writing is, what I do if I am having a feeling or thought that is impacting me in some way is write about it. Writing about it helps me think about it more clearly. It helps me ride it out.
If I just think about something, I am much more liable to fixate on it and get into a brain spin. Writing seems to put a bit of structure around it, whatever “it” is, and help me work it out instead of just inventing alternative scenarios until I can’t think of anything else.
Writing helps me pinpoint what it is that is bothering me, but forces me to be relatively concise about it. I may not stop thinking about it completely after writing about something, but there’s a good chance that I’ll know myself and my feelings better.
It might bring out unwelcome emotions in the short term while I’m writing, but long term it keeps me calmer. That is a huge help in letting go of what needs letting go, or figuring out what I want to do about something where a more concrete decision is in order.
Where it’s most helpful, though, is with the kind of things where there is no right or wrong answer. Where it’s not a question of just making a decision but where there’s a situation I’m just struggling with mentally. When really, I just need to get my shit together and hang on.
I am very good at hanging on, but I wouldn’t vouch for my level of sanity.
If I can write it out, then there’s a very good chance I can ride out just about anything without going completely nuts.
I’m still partially nuts. Nothing can fix that.
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