Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Jan 25, 2007

Thinking Out Loud: Writing it down

Filed in Blog

Quite often, lately, I get to the point where I feel I’m being killed by pillows being dropped on me, lots and lots of fluffy nightmarish pillows. Each pillow is Something Which Must Be Done–each in and of itself is nothing major, nothing traumatic–it’s just that there are lots of them, and they keep on coming. Somewhere, in some parallel universe, there is a giant pillow fight going on, and I’m getting some of the misses. It makes me want to stick my head under a pillow and hide. Oh, wait. That won’t work.

A few weeks ago I posted about a system for getting organized. This is somewhat like that, but its focus is different. This is about the emotions of feeling overwhelmed, and something I’ve just recently discovered about myself.

I wrote a post about how all this felt, how there was too much muchness, in a different journal from this one. I was motivated to write because I wanted to explain why I wasn’t around much and not taking part in a great many social activities. And I wrote down that I couldn’t do x, y and z because I couldn’t decide whether to do a, b or c first, and in which order.

The very next day I did in fact, do x, y and z. I even did a, b and c. Now that was interesting.

A couple of days later the whelm level was once again rising to “over.” Okay. I scribbled down something about it. It wasn’t lists, it wasn’t coloring blocks in with a crayon, not even something that I let anybody else read. I just wrote down how I felt, and you know what? Before too much longer I had done all the things that I hadn’t been feeling able to do. In actual fact, because of this, my to-do list is shrinking so fast that if I’m not careful I’ll have nothing left to do. (j/k)

In other words, writing things down apparently allows my subconscious just enough breathing space so that it can do all the sorting out for me and give me enough of a clue to get started. The mental and emotional sense of “argh” that gets in the way of action is released like steam from a kettle. It’s almost like magic!

People talk about affirmations, and I suppose it’s the same idea, but I’ve never been able to force myself to write shiny happy things to make all my dreams come true. It has always seemed well, dull and chore-ish to me, like lines at school: not something to put me in the mind for bringing in “abundance.” And besides, it’s not about abundance, except in the much larger sense of knowing where I want to get to; it’s about being able to function without having an oversized marshmallow attack.

So just writing a little note about it, even if nobody actually ends up reading it, seems to release whatever it is that’s blocking me. Which is cool. It is beyond cool, since I’m a writer, that writing can help me to write, function and produce. What fun!

You know, I decided to be a writer when I was six years old. Okay, I had a brief flirtation with being an astronaut, but then I realized you had to be good at science and not doing general science instead of physics etc. because you had to do a science and that was the least science I could do. (I should probably donate some commas to the last sentence, but I digress.) I won an infants’ school competition with a story about a white witch in the woods to whom everybody brought their sick hedgehogs and I’d bandage them up and they’d be all set. So writing is one of the few things in my life of which I’ve always been sure.

But I didn’t realize that I could use it like this. And I’m not sure what’s more exciting–finding out that I can, or finding out something new about writing.

I feel awfully lucky that I have this tool available now that we are losing our home and buying an RV but not until we’ve had our home bought out and have to figure out how quickly we can move out so that we can drive to Charleston in time for the convention and by the way I’m taking baby steps into a new career and there’s a map server to design and three web sites to move to new hosting and…see? I told you I was grateful.

Isn’t it lovely that I can write all this down?