I started writing down my thoughts before I understood why I was writing them; at least initially. I used to write my thoughts down when I was younger, just writing about my day or week or an event in my life that happened.
The journaling began around age eight and continued to around age fifteen, when I could no longer find a private place to have my journal. The privacy of my inner thoughts and feelings (and a lot of shameless daydreaming!) was violated a couple of times by my family members and I no longer felt free to write them down. Once my journal was read to others in humor, then again, to use as emotional ammunition against me, I couldn’t take the risk any longer. I was told that I should never write anything down I didn’t want someone else to read and it was decades before I started writing about life again, always fearful someone else would read what I wrote, and use it against me.
I’ve always liked to write things down; I am a list maker, too. The thoughts in my head felt like they were swimming a million miles an hour, all day and sometimes all night. Without writing my plans or experiences, thoughts and dreams, my thoughts felt like a jumbled mess that I had no hope of untangling.
To accept I am now in a safe space to write my thoughts down, with complete trust that the people I am around will not violate that trust, is amazing. I didn’t realize where some of my trust issues came from until I began writing again. It’s scary to open yourself up when trust was broken, but I am discovering once you do, things change.
Many people are isolated in their own thoughts and feelings because they feel shame or because they feel they are the only ones having the feelings they do. They’re not. Everyone has experiences in their life they feel they handled in the wrong way or could have handled better. Everyone has hurt someone; intentional or not, the hurt is the same. Everyone has a secret. Everyone has loss and pain, and for every perspective, there is an opposite or competing perspective based on their own experiences in life. Are you wrong, or are they wrong?
You can only know what you are able to take into your heart from your own experience. Some people seem to walk through life without thought for others. Are they evil? I don’t know; maybe they are just unwilling or unable to dig deep into discovering who they are at their core. Maybe they are just surviving, because the pain is too intense to face. They don’t have the tools to help, or they just can’t or don’t care enough.
I’ve spent so much time pondering this, but for me, I decided I can’t concern myself so much what others think or say. I can only control how I act and react. How I live my life now and how I decide to live my going forward.
Have you ever journaled to process your trauma or emotions? Has it been helpful to you?
Please leave your comments below; I would love to hear from you!
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