To Touch That Deeper Level
The outpouring of support and story-sharing from my posts this week (part 1 and part 2) was amazing. Not only for me to feel the love, but to know I created a space where others felt safe to share their own stories of frustration and loss.It's been 5 months since the experience itself, but the want to write the story has been knocking around in my head for almost as long. At the start of the year, I had big plans for my blog - the number of posts, the consistent schedule, the ideas I could explore... but then life and work and energetic ups and downs come along and knock plans straight off the rails.Writing, even journaling in the mornings, slid away from me. Maybe it's all the coaching I'm doing... I thought, working through my issues in a different way, but I knew that wasn't true. I was hiding or avoiding. I was exhausted.Like Jill, I am feeling quiet about some things lately. I don't know how to write about them in general, let alone publish them here, but I realized that not knowing how to write about my present life doesn't mean I need to stop writing about my whole life. So, just last week I decided to take 30min before work and brain-dump as much of a draft of the doctor story as I could. The experience that kept nagging me to tell it. The post I felt I should write.I sat down the next day, and the next, writing for 30min increments with a timer. After 3 days of drafting a half-hour at a time, I added in another hour or two of editing, and it was done. A story that I've wanted to tell for months was blog-post-ready in less than 3 days of work, a collective 5 hrs.And I feel so much better. Not because the story is great or even that it is out of my head and into the world, but because I wrote. I stepped away from the email / Facebook / TV cycle, stopped the input of information, stopped beating myself up for not having enough time / energy / focus and just created.
Your heart will pour right out of you once it gets going. You will fumble and you will fail and you will discover and you will delight. You will laugh and you will cry and you will breathe once again and you will be alive. Most of all, you will remember who you are. Why You Simply Must Create, Jamie Ridler
This week, I am reminded why I write. It's mostly for my own self-care, to process my feelings, to weave the thread of meaning through my days. It's also to guide people - to carry a lantern through the dark and say, "Look, I've been here, and now you're here, and we'll both be OK." But at the very basic level, it's about my experience of my experiences, how creating allows me to live my life at a deeper level, to access things that float by in daily life, but cannot be full realized until they're brought back through my creativity.It feels so good to be back. xo