Breathe

Writing is for me a personal exercise that varies according to the other ups and downs in my life. At times, my writing is like the heartbeat of my life--five full journals, most with six- to ten-page entries at times, testify to the importance of writing to my personality and wellbeing. At other times. . . it's hard to say. Either writing is still my heartbeat, just my heart is almost not beating, or maybe it's that writing fades into distant memory, like a forgotten motion of the hand that used to be habitual, daily, and necessary in another phase of life.

These days writing often seems far away, as though more a part of my past than present. My mind is surprised that I am asking it to write for this exercise, and it feels unsure of itself, cautious, self-conscious. In fact, this is probably not the tone I would ideally use for writing a post, but one must assume some tone to begin with, right? Write? Haha. :-)

I think that the state of my writing both reflects and feeds the other things going on in my life at any given time. Often I find that if I am not writing, I am also not working through my thoughts or dealing with the struggles of life well. The state of not-writing allows me to ignore things that I don't want to deal with, and it causes me to also neglect joys of life that I should be savoring. This is because writing is like exhaling for me--I can't take in all the events and thoughts of life without some way to also release them and move on. Writing is the way my heart exhales, releasing to paper all the sorrows I wish to forget and all the joys I want to remember.

Elizabeth