THANKFUL FRIDAY

I started working on a writing project in October of last year. It has become one of my UFPs (unfinished projects) sitting in my Google docs, but I tend to visit this one more often than any of the others. It is a writing project that will not be able to see the light of day for (hopefully) a few years and maybe this is why it has become so easy for me to sporadically add to the story. I’ve tried writing a story centered around Chris and being a widow and I probably have five different UFP versions of this story blinking at me whenever I open Google docs. I just get to a spot where there’s nothing to write. I don’t know how to end it or it just feels emotionally better to leave it as it is. Sort of like vague plans or booking the hotel reservation but not doing any research on what you should see and do in that area. This thing I’ve been working on off and on since October feels like something I’ll eventually finish, like I know how to end it when the time comes.

That being said, my writing style is very undisciplined. It seems that I can commit to coming up with content for this space at least twice a week, but any thing with multiple pages and chapters is a really big commitment. I am an ebb and flow kind of artist. When I’m really inspired to be out and about with my camera and working on photography projects, I have little inspiration for writing. The writing flows in when I’m in a photography lull. I thought maybe the practice of combining the two things would lead to more finished projects, but that hasn’t happened. Right now, I am writing. That’s where I am in this ebb and flow. I wrote about a particular time and some events and as I wrote it all down, I found myself crying at my desk. I was surprised because I thought I had worked through my feelings about those events. I thought I had already done the work to release that pain and that there would be nothing to bring up in the writing of this story. But apparently I still had some feelings tucked away that needed to be addressed.

There was a brief section of time when I was seeing a therapist. I didn’t do too much to seek out this therapist, no interview process. I just went with someone my insurance would accept and walked in not really knowing what to expect. Once a week I’d sit in a cushy chair in an office with my therapist and I would just talk. I needed very little prompting and received no more prompting than “how are we feeling today?”, but this was all I needed to spill the bean can of complaints I had filled up since my last visit. At the end of each session, my therapist would say something along the lines of ‘thank you for sharing’ and that would be it until the next week. After about year of this I felt like I had talked all of my complaints out of my system and didn’t feel like I had anything else to contribute to my therapist. And that was it. I never received homework or any kind of “what if you tried…” My therapist was just a listener. I stopped going to therapy and never made an effort to find a new therapist.

The truth is, my writing practice has been the most helpful tool for sorting and dealing with my emotions.

I am by no means discounting therapy. My one time therapist expedition is not a remotely fair measure of the benefits of therapy. I benefited from time with my therapist. I had overachieved in the no complaining department, not speaking up when things annoyed or bothered me. Even on the blog, I avoided complaints. So for a year, I spilled them all out in a safe space to someone who was basically a stranger. I learned to find ways to communicate about the things that annoyed me without whining. I’ve just had a better experience moving through the really hard deeper emotions by writing about them. This makes me very grateful for my writing practice even when there are times I’m not doing much of it. My creative endeavors are part of my therapy and while I have invested money and time into one creative endeavor like new a new camera and a new lens, I realized that I haven’t invested in my writing. So this week I purchased a gratitude gift for myself, a book on writing titled 1,000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round.

I don’t know if this means I will be writing a thousand words every day. Maybe this is one way to replace my Fortune Cookie Journal. Who knows? But also, maybe instead of asking the question “will I ever write a book?” I can start asking the question “will my book get published?”