Self-Care Sunday Week #3: My Writing Outlet
Where do I begin this week? This week made me realize how precious time is and how we often take it for granted, most of us think there’s always tomorrow, but for many of us tomorrow never comes.
The holiday season is supposed to be a magical time filled with joy. Our kids deserve to feel the magic in the air, drinking hot chocolate, watching holiday movies, baking cookies without a care in the world.
However, according to an article in Psychology Today “many therapists do agree that depression and anxiety tend to heighten during the holiday season …the demands and stress of the holidays and the expectations to be happy can make an individual feel even more depressed, especially if he/she is already struggling with a mood disorder.” (Fuller, 2019)
During these times of stress, we need to take care of ourselves. There’s so much uncertainty in life, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and depressed, one thing that helps me process my feelings and my thoughts is writing. Honestly, expressing myself on paper has always been so much easier for me. Even as a child, I would write my parents notes and letters when I wanted to tell them something. I would even write poetry on toilet paper when I didn’t have paper!
In high school, all I could do was write. I think that’s why my grades slipped, I just didn’t pay attention – I couldn’t, I had so much pain and confusion happening inside that I had to get it out, but I didn’t want anyone to know, so I’d write. I never thought about what I was writing, it just poured out of me. When I’m depressed or sad my mind spins and writing helps me get out what I’m thinking and feeling. At sixteen I wrote a poem with the line “thoughts scatter through my mind as if they never even entered it”, I felt like the only way I could put into words what I was going through was to write them. Honestly, I have so many journals and wrote so much throughout the years it’s become a running joke in my family. With everything going on this year, my family keeps saying everyone’s going to need a new journal!
I look back on the things that I’ve written over the years and realize how far I’ve come in many areas. Journaling is a part of self-reflection, I see patterns in my behaviors, feelings and relationships and it provides me with a way to see what still needs to be worked on. Life is a process, there is no easy path, there’s not even one path, writing is part of my life’s path. Change and growth are necessary parts of living, nothing should remain stagnant, and as cliché as it is, we need to remember where we’ve been to know where it is we want to go. Who I am and who I want to become are direct results of who I was and what I experienced.
So, while, self-care can be about pampering and spoiling ourselves (because we need that too), it is also those things that we need to do to take care of ourselves in order to survive. For me, letting people in to know how I feel is scary and I don’t always like to let my walls down and be vulnerable, so when I feel I have nowhere to turn or no one to talk to, I write. There are times I need to write, to purge everything that I bottle up inside of me, my hopes and fears; when life fucks me up and I don’t know what to do, when I feel lost or unheard my pen and paper are always there … “Because paper has more patience than people” – Anne Frank.
Fuller, K., MD. (2019, December 5). Holiday Depression and the Most Wonderful Time of the Year Bringing the joy back into your life during the holiday season. Retrieved December 20, 2020, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-is-state-mind/201912/holiday-depression-and-the-most-wonderful-time-the-year