Writing is Healing:A Story of Naming the Thing

I’ve written a good deal about releasing the outcome.  In fact it’s the basis of Your (Aligned) Girl in a Crisis and I hope to release a reading podcast from that book on this very subject soon. 

AND

I was struggling this past weekend to sit in the discomfort that comes with releasing the outcome.  

It took a lot of scribbling in my notebook to come to the conclusion that this is what had me feeling so very out of sorts.  There are a litany of big unknowns around here and I can’t do a dang thing to ensure that the outcome I want occurs.This is supremely uncomfortable.  And that discomfort was evident in the way everything else was coming out sideways.  Simple things felt impossibly hard and I didn’t know which way to turn.Here’s where I needed support.  

I know that writing is healing and I needed someone to tell me to get out my notebook.  

It was hard.  

In fact, it seemed impossible.  

I couldn’t grasp the swirl in my head long enough to create a coherent sentence about a broken refrigerator at Synergy House, our retreat house and Air Bnb.  How was I going to write?  

The answer- just pick up the pen and put it to paper.  Let whatever comes, come.  And after I wrote the date, the word “yearning” popped up on the page and I was off, listing all of the things I was yearning and wanting.  From there, I recognized that all of them were out of my control and from there I discovered that my problem was that I was struggling to sit in the discomfort and loosen my death grip on the outcome.  What happened was a whole lot of naming the feeling.  And once I named it, I could do something with it.

Sit with it.

Accept it.

Explore it.

Create a plan for next steps.

All in writing.

And after all of that, I took a gigantic nap because one of the things I discovered in my writing is that I was waaaaaaayyyyy behind on sleep and your girl cannot function that way.So my invitation to you is to find a notebook and writing implement that you love and let it fly.  Don’t worry about making sense.  Let it be messy, let it all bubble up.  See how it feels to say the scary thing, the ugly thing.  See how it feels to drag in into the light and on the page and name it so you can see what you are dealing with.Let me know how that goes!XOXO

Cindy