The rain has started in California and I am feeling the joys of warm snuggly nights with hot cacao and marshmallows sitting beside my bed as I stay warm under the covers to write. Whether I am writing on my lap top for fiction stories or by hand in my journal to relive memories, that is when I am most happy.
Recently, and by that I mean in the last half year, I have not used writing to its full potential in my life. I know that writing out my feelings truly helps me by processing the emotions. Putting the words down on paper and allowing them to live in the physical world feels like I am detoxing my mind. I am free of their burdens and I am able to see the emotion so I can put together ideas for facing or organizing the way I feel.
If I know how valuable writing is for my emotional state, why have I been neglecting it as a tool? Well, let’s see what my potential writing time is being filled with: I am watching more content, even more than reading content, and obviously more than writing content. Watching television and reading books became my method for avoiding negative emotions and boredom when I was a child. That has definitely transferred to my adult life. When I want to avoid and bury my emotions, stress, anger, sadness, frustration, I put on a show that will transport me out of my life and mind for a while. My troubles are gone and I only have to be concerned with the trouble of characters on the screen. I know this is not a habit unique to me, a lot of people likely do this.
The problem with watching too much television or other content (Youtube videos) is that when I turn it off and come back to my reality, I am left with additional negative emotions. First, my original feelings have not disappeared, second, my time has been wasted – usually I binge shows and videos to lengthen my absence from real-world problems, and third, I am regretful that all that time not doing work was filled with watching content instead of with more meaningful activities that I always say I want to do like reading and writing.
Writing this all out now feels redundant because I’ve had all these thoughts running through my mind for a long time. I’ve talked them through with myself and tried changing my screen-time behavior. I have analyzed my weekly television (as a proxy for escaping reality) watching habits and tried to use that to help me change. So, the next question I must ask is, why am I having such a hard time turning off a show to do what I actually want to do?
The answer is simple. I am scared of facing the emotions I am feeling. If I take time to sit down and write honestly, the raw emotion living inside me will burst out. It will feel overwhelming and unmanageable. It will feel disorienting and intimidating. Maybe I won’t know where to start, maybe I will spend too much time on a single piece of the problem, maybe I will not be able to manage the emotion through writing after all and then what can I do?
It is likely that I’ve come to this same conclusion over and over in the past six months. I know that the fear of feeling overwhelmed, the fear of starting something, the fear of doing something wrong stunts my productivity and ability to reach my potential. Well then, I need to take a hard long look at my tattoo and remember what I went through that pain for. I need to take a deep breath and jump into the abyss.
snowhiteice 