Journaling

thoughts on thinking ...

Sometimes journaling is like reaching into the whirlwind of your mind and pulling out some debris, pinning it to paper, then going back in for more. But as you force hand to paper, slowly the whirlwind calms down and the pieces of swirling thought coalesce into something scrapped together, sometimes in a gratifyingly coherent structure, or more often in some unnatural, otherworldy jumble. But either way, you've tamed the wild storm and connected more fragments, slowly constructing your glass castle through which to view the world. (not sure what I mean by that last part ... i'll try writing about it more to figure it out ...)

Sometimes journaling is a truth-puking exercise.

But it is cathartic somehow to write. I process thoughts much better through writing than talking or thinking. Even thinking, the kind of thinking where you lose the world around you as you disappear into the abyss of your mind, doesn't move understanding or acceptance forward like writing does. Thoughts exist in varying levels of embodiment; the initial intangible feelings make their way slowly to the level of unframed anxieties or daydreams, which, if fed enough, grow into fleshed out alternate-realities, but still, even in this level, they oscillate between the conscious level where words define thought and the subconscious level where thoughts/feelings/dream-worlds are intimately, viscerally felt and understood. To force yourself to write is to push all of that to its ultimate embodiment, drawing shapeless thoughts out from the depths of your mind across the barrier of consciousness where only thoughts that can be formed into, or matched with, words can exist. Much can be lost in translation, but the more faithful you are to keep moving the pen across paper, the more the thoughts charge forward to be defined, embodied, and finished. The freedom of journaling comes in this "finishing," this closure to the endless cycle of thought-processing. Once thoughts have made it into written words, they can be left to rot or revisited at will; the cycle is complete. Written words are victorious proof that thoughts went somewhere, and we can be free then to develop, share, or burn them.