My cousin Ruby wrote me an incredibly thoughtful email after I released my blog. As an assignment from “The Artist’s Way” that I am currently completing, I rewrote some of my favorite words from her email. One of them goes like this: “healing by enacting and investigating healing.” Writing these words, I was struck by what she saw in my words and my posts that I hadn’t seen, and I wonder if the healing she saw is real, and I also wonder if that matters at all.
I have always been someone obsessed with learning and coping and bettering. Self help is my shit, just not necessarily in the form of bestsellers. I find it in the form of detailed journal entries about my habits and reactions and how I can change those / why it’s worth changing / what I can lean on to remember this change I want to make. I write down lines from poems and Instagram posts and New York Times OpEds—anything that seems to capture the art of living (well).
And yet, I’ve always sensed a large expanse between actions and words. Don’t get me wrong, writing about my life has helped immensely (otherwise this blog and my stack of finished Moleskine journals wouldn’t exist). Through writing, I’ve definitely changed / realized some things, like the patterns in my friendships (judgement, jealousy, cultivation), what environments tend to lead to the least loneliness (having multiple interactions built into my day, being able to learn and teach constantly, communities that share food together, sunshine), and what triggers my anger (things I’m working on in myself, people who act some way that I have told myself I can’t, ways of living that are counter to my own), my anxiety (having a plan interrupted, taking on too much but acting like it’s my own fault, feeling like there’s not enough time).
Writing has also helped me cultivate new habits (writing every morning, pushups after I run, calling people even when I don’t want to but I know I need to hear someone’s voice, meditating, listening to podcasts when I’m lonely) and realize some big thoughts about my life and what I want to do with it (right now I’m thinking about being an intimacy coordinator or a speech writer or a therapist or an author).
BUT it’s always easier on paper than in the world. As much as I write about churning jealousy into appreciation, or how much it would help me to meditate every afternoon, or how certain habits would help my mental health, I still struggle. I don’t do those things: I don’t meditate on Tuesday and then I keep not meditating for the whole week and then I forget completely about my journal entry about meditating until, a month or so later, I remember it and re-proclaim it to my journal, to my self.
And yet, Ruby said that investigating healing was healing itself.
Is there something about spending time thinking and writing about something that makes it true? Or at least somewhat true? Even if you don’t get over your jealousies, does writing about them and how you hope to change do something anyways?
It’s got to, part of me says, because writing about something is different than not writing about something. It’s like this video I saw online that said that exercising 10 minutes is so much better than not exercising at all. Thinking about changing is better than not changing at all. I think I believe it. I think what we write about affects us even if afterwards we get up and do the exact same thing we did yesterday. You’re laying the groundwork for change and healing in ways that you can’t see now. But those minute changes—even just beginning to conceive of yourself as someone who meditates—are what massive changes are birthed from.
Slow, incremental change— perhaps it all starts with a pen.
Thoughts/ prompts:
1. What do you usually write about?
2. When you want to make a change in your habits, what do you do first?
3. How have you healed in the past?
4. Thoughts on self-help books? Are they too preoccupied with changing and bettering or are they helpful?
5. Have any of you completed "The Artist's Way"? If so, I would love to hear from you about it!