writing and emotions
Writing has always allowed me to feel connected to my deepest feelings, even those that I was unaware of. Empathy allows me to better understand others, and I sometimes get lost in it.
Maybe I can’t fully understand the people around me. The only empathy I have, ultimately, is with myself.
And if I share what I feel, with all the depth that I am capable of writing… somewhere, I may be describing the same feeling as someone else.
When I try to focus too much on how someone else feels, I forget how I feel. That’s how I get gray and sad.
What if sharing the universe of my emotions helped others to discover and understand theirs? Putting words on the ineffable, on the non-visualizable, the non-descriptive, because purely abstract, and so concrete at the same time.
Do you realize how much your feelings are your strength and your allies? That the world around you is just a representation of your brain?
There are so many other ways to represent our everyday reality, our events, our passions, our sadness, and our moments of emptiness.
This is also what hypnosis has allowed me to achieve. Sometimes in my hypnosis sessions I saw concrete scenes, and other times I saw totally metaphorical scenes. My brain was creating the metaphor itself, finding, I imagine, no better way to communicate to me the information about the emotional impact an event might have had on me.
The metaphor speaks to itself, carrying a lot of meaning in few images.
I would like to share these metaphors that came to me. These poems about moments in life, reflecting strange but distinct feelings. Our vocabulary is far too limited to designate everything. What are these things that we feel, and that it is difficult to describe?
For me, the real discomfort came when I was afraid to write what I felt. Afraid to face all these dark thoughts in my head. Then one day I went to see a therapist, and when he asked me what was wrong, I had a hard time answering. I told him that sometimes I start crying for nothing, without controlling myself or knowing where it came from. He asked me what I was thinking every time I cried, and I was stuck, I didn’t know how to answer. Each time it happened to me, I tried to forget the emotions, the thoughts, to find calm and stability.
But by dint of trying to forget my problem, I had become insensitive and unable to describe it.
My first duty was, the next times these tears would come to me, to write down at the same time, on my phone for example, the thoughts that came to mind and that I had become accustomed to chasing away.
My first duty was, in other words, to face what I was feeling, to put it into words. To stop running away trying to prove to myself that I was happy when I wasn’t.
October 29, 2019
