“I can shake off everything as I write: my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn” – Anne Frank
The pandemic has ensured that we humans cannot do the one thing that heals us best, being close to each other to just share our fears, anxieties and happiness or just pack our bags and push off for some impromptu time off with friends when things feel too much. But even with the many restrictions we face today due to the pandemic the many feelings we carry in that little big heart need its own rightful space and expression, even more so in these crazy times.
Emotions are the most dominant yet the most understated feature of an individual. And just as we should love ourselves for all the physical features, we must in the very least acknowledge our emotional features. Emotions are fluid, they swing in their magnitude, their manifestation in human behaviour, their timing – you can’t tell what emotion would play up even when you are fully aware of carrying an emotion.
We all need to grapple with these emotions sometimes and the least and probably the only thing you can do is give them the attention they deserve.
An easy and effective way to manage these emotions is to write it down. Note down and recognise whatever it is you are feeling. By writing you are able to acknowledge the existence of an emotion be it gratitude, melancholy, contentment, amusement, nature, art, perfection, poetry, attachment, disenchantment, love, just about anything
Writing is about looking your emotions in the eye, acknowledging them and accepting them. So, write as though in a conversation, like no one is reading, like you don’t care who reads it and passes judgments, just write.
You will be surprised that everything we feel, think and reflect about has already been written, thought and felt by many others and feels like a familiar emotion to so many others who we don’t know from anywhere.
Journaling or writing down your thoughts is like yoga for emotions. Like yoga it’s a soft but impactful exercise to help manage your emotions and helps you flex your thoughts, its mental processing and eventually even behaviour.
Emotions mirror your insides and for you to feel good about them there is always some work that needs to get done. You bring out your emotion, you see it for what it really is no matter how the world sees it and what may be socially desirable. Then you spend some time with what you’ve written until you can reflect on it and get comfortable with it. You don’t get judgemental or beat yourself up for that feeling or thought and accept it as a feature of your emotional frame.
This acceptance helps you gather the courage to move to the next best thing you can do with it in terms of your behaviour. By looking at your emotions, raw and unfiltered you gather courage to be more yourself and also the better version of yourself.
There is immense calm in knowing your emotions and that’s also why reading is so soothing because someone out there wrote something that’s totally you.
So, write away because writing is therapeutic, its Catharsis, it is Art, its Science, its Healing …