I am gregarious, a people person. I’ve always had a group of close friends, or a tight work team, or a church community. As a young person, I was drawn to theatre because of its collaborative nature, and because onstage or behind stage, there were no unimportant parts. Everyone mattered. I think I might be the only person I know who honestly enjoys group projects. I love the process of figuring out what fits well for people to do, and I even like helping group members find their way.
My mild ocd traits of getting lost in mirrors, within time loops, or in repetitive motions have mostly faded as I’ve gotten older, but they did serve to set patterns of stillness and silence within a very busy brain. Also, my father used to say that going with him to nightly symphony rehearsals from my infancy until about age 5 while my mother took night classes gave me an ability to be quiet anywhere.
But it isn’t really my natural state. I can reach nearly meditative patterns in a large crowd, with the energy of hundreds of people holding me, moving me, as they swirl in and out of my scope. Honestly, my mind calms in in-person cacophony. It’s one of the many reasons I loved Middle School Youth Ministry.
I’ve looked for ways to find stillness as an adult, especially when the crowd solution hasn’t been either available or safe. As a person with anxiety, depression, and chronic pain, I can say that finding it is difficult in the best of times. I am able to calm my mind and sit for hours, with a light focus and meditative state, but my body can no longer be physically still that long. I can engage in walking meditations that keep me moving, but those take space I often do not have.
Then there are the mental narratives, the imagined conversations or remembered vignettes, that have been bubbling up in my brain of late. Some are good but most are not. Most of these unspoken scenes were born from some trauma, or are wrestling with a hard bump in a relationship. In the early hours of the morning, or when I am tired or hungry, I am incredibly susceptible to falling into these loops. I can spin myself into tears of rage or despair by following those narratives around and around my brain.
My husband recently reminded me of a tactic, of writing a letter I never intend to send, as a way to purge these plays from taking over the theatre of my mind. It’s a suggestion I’ve made to many other people over the years but of course, just not one I could recall for myself.
We know that separate and particular parts of our brains are triggered by writing. Some educators recommend that all students re-write lecture notes to secure this additional learning. Some contemplative traditions advocate free-writing, a stream of consciousness method of getting words out onto paper.
I often advise journaling when someone comes to me stuck in some way. The activity has been part of my life off and on as long as I can remember, and in a box on my bookshelf, I have almost every one of my journals from childhood. Not a single one -well maybe 1 or 2- is full and in the rest, only about a quarter of the pages is generally used. Being both sentimental and efficient, I have re-used the emptiest of these journals again and again when I’ve picked up the discipline again. It makes for interesting time jumps when a single recycled journal is read through.
It occurs to me this kind of writing -journaling, purge letters, freeform- is internal communication. Even when our guesses at behavior and responses be pretty much on point, it’s all still projection, supposition. So why not lean into this? Why not use writing as a way to reach inward, connect with our own selves? Any one of those methods I mentioned earlier would be effective, each serving different needs.
Journaling helps get tangles out of our heads. Even simple list making of the troublesome things can shift perspective. When we journal, we can chronicle or remark. Document or reflect. Explore or assert. We can do all of this, of course, and journaling doesn’t really have any rules. It only tends to be more narrative than freeform writing, but even that isn’t hard and fast. Several of my journal entries have been bizarre over the years.
Purge letters are something I have not done in a long, long time and obviously need to. Writing some will be among my spiritual work this week. There are also few rules in this realm, the only one being that the letter is not sent. Sometimes, that is by necessity. The person may be dead, or the place gone. Yes, these letters can be to inanimate objects as well as people. We can grieve the loss of place, we can be mad as hell at a disease. But most often, it is because you unlocked something in yourself by giving permission NOT to send the letter. You will probably be wrong in your assessment that you’ve said something *just perfectly* and that the person addressed will finally get it. No. IF you be right, the letter will stand some time, and can be re-written cleanly. Later.
I encountered free writing in its stream of consciousness form in my formal studies of literature. But it became something I brought into my own life when I worked through Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” many years ago. The ‘morning pages’ her workbook required -three full handwritten pages each morning with no planning or thought- are still utterly unreadable to me but precious.
There are several of these simple and small action of moving inward. Writing in any of these ways is just one kind of internal connective action. Prayer and meditation are effective tools for many. Discovering what monastics call the ‘cell of your heart’ as a place for rest is a gift. But meeting ourselves is sometimes scary and daunting. It is easy to become disassociated from who we are, and re-forging our relationships with ourselves takes work like any other.
We are embodied beings and some of this reconnection will need to be physical. We do not all have the same physical ability or mobility, but we are all taking breaths. We can feel the blood moving through our bodies. We can pick up a pen and place it on paper and begin. No judgement, no outcome. Just start.