As someone who lives inside her head almost all the time, writing is an essential human function for me, almost at par with taking a walk or exercising. Writing is an important activity more than just a hobby or pasttime. For me, writing is a way of coping up with a lot of personal issues—trauma, anxiety, rumination, depression and dissociation.
But recently, my capacity to write has been greatly impaired, in many aspects. I was required to take in a lot of information from the real world, which I cannot reject, since they are essential to how I can bring food to my plate to stay alive. I constantly communicated with different people with different personalities. I was told conflicting comments about my writing style—deep and not fit for workplace, and at the same time comprehensive and understandable—making me conclude that I just cannot please everybody but I am totally fine. Most of all, I could not find the time to process my thoughts—untangle them—on top of even writing them. And it was not because “I could not make time”. I was robbed of opportunities.
I have a lot to say, but no breathable opportunity to do so. So for a while, I just kept living like a robot, or a zombie—materializing tasks but finding no meaning. Mental overload is difficult to bear.
Lack of opportunity to write is like taking out a whole food group out of my diet (if I even have a firm diet in the first place). It is like cutting off the source of a certain source of nutrient or antioxidant essential to keep me functioning.
That time was like plague or draught, like letting pests cause permanent damage or the heat toast my brain. Writing is the pesticide which kill off the pests and prevent plagues moving forward. Writing is the rain which washes the impurities on my mind away, and without it, my mind just slowly withers.
It was a hopeless time. I just processed what was fed to me, like a machine. But without an internal support system, it was like being diluted by acids or scrubbed by sandpaper and flintstones, with no opportunity to repair. No amount of afterwork praise or star marks could quench my thirst. I just wanted to face myself again.
I decided to just stop everything altogether.
Writing my thoughts was recommended to me as a form of therapy. It’s not that I did not know this—I was fond of writing even during my school days. So I treat that recommendation more of an affirmation that, from the very beginning, I was right, I should really write.
When I was deprived of the opportunity to write, that was when I realized that writing is a basic human function for me, which led me to describe it in the first paragraph.
Now, I am looking forward to be able to sit and think things through. I am looking forward to identify the thoughts I accumulated silently over the past year. I am looking forward to sort them out and group them accordingly. I am looking forward to determine their impact—past, which I just let happen so that I can finally attend to them, and future, in order for me to understand how to deal with the untamed thoughts properly. I am looking forward to get that vitamin supply that was cut off of me, to receive that rain to water my dry land, and to face myself like how I used to do.
Writing produces a happy feeling of satisfaction. It is like saying, “My thoughts were real, and I wrote them here.”
I am looking forward to healing through writing.
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