The Power of Expression

I never really considered myself a “writer”. Up until junior or senior year of high school a writing assignment was synonymous with a death sentence. I hated words and vocabulary. I didn’t understand a thing about grammar, sentence structure, or punctuation. My “writing process” consisted of reading over the assignment anywhere from 10 to 20 times followed by staring at a blank word document or lined piece of paper for a solid 45 minutes, feeling defeated after no attempt at even working, and reverting to Netflix! Who would have thought that I would ever want to pursue writing… as a CAREER!!!???!!!??? Definitely not me! But now, here I am, with heaps and heaps of journals, Word documents pasted with ideas, fears, emotions, and thoughts that race too fast for me to process them.

I’m not quite sure exactly when the whole “writing thing” made its transformation from “death sentence” to “natural SSRI” or “therapeutic healing tactic”. I mean, it’s a pretty dramatic shift but considering my nickname growing up was Sarah Bernhardt, would you expect anything else? I spent many journal entries and dedicated pages to my love of writing and my analysis of where that love came from. I kind of started a blog while studying abroad in France my junior year of high school. It was definitely not consistent and most definitely not an accurate and honest description of my experiences there. It was full of frilly writing, words that I didn’t understand (dictionary.com practically wrote each post for me), and false statements of excitement, joy, and my love of cold weather… HA! While I truly did love the people that I met there, my growing ability to speak French, and the beauty that France offered, I was plagued with depression, anxiety, and an eating disorder that absorbed and crushed my life, thoughts, and happiness. I wrote one thing on my public blog while simultaneously writing the opposite feelings and thoughts in my own personal journal. So while my “writing” might have started in France, my what I like to call “truthful writing” began when I dropped out of school.

Due to the mental illnesses listed above, I dropped out of the study abroad program a little over half way into it in order to enter an eating disorder residential treatment facility (SUPER fun!) The morning before moving into the treatment center, the girl that had hated writing, went out and bought a journal. Maybe it was future me saying, “you can’t forget this” or God and you know, his ability to know our futures, or just a spastic purchase. Whatever it may have been, that journal was the greatest gift to my recovery and healing; the recovery of my body, mind, emotions, and the healing of relationships, family dynamics, and just a broken girl. I wrote in that journal every single day. I went from sporadic journal entries (aka once a year) to daily journal entries. It was a crazy shift, even for me, but also such an important one.

As cliché as this sounds, I feel like my world completely opened up as soon I opened up that journal and took out my sunflower pen and started to write. My thoughts finally had a place to go. It was like a spring cleaning for my mind. Every feeling flooded into black ink and filled up the pages. Every thought was articulated and developed into stories and analyses. Every fear no longer held an overwhelming spot in my head. My journal was/is my art form. It is the deepest expression of myself and most heartfelt truths. It’s also pretty dang embarrassing but who doesn’t have a pretty embarrassing story?!

I feel like writing has helped define me as a person in this world. One of my biggest fears is mediocrity (more on that in a different blog post…) but I feel like the voice that I am given through writing is such a defining feature that pulls me up out of that “pit” of mediocrity. Writing is an escape. It is an expression - my expression. Writing puts me at ease, excites me, motivates me, makes me cry, laugh, and fills me with all sorts of other tingly things. So here’s to art forms and here’s to expression. Expressionism applies to so much more than just paintings or as an artistic style. However you express yourself (within reason my dear friends!!), pursue that. Allow yourself to breathe, take in the beauty of life, and if worse comes to worse, just splatter paint something on a canvas and that really has helped me calm the HECK down!!!!!