Writing anger

May 7, 2014  |  ibrainmapadmin

I’ve had some people contact me to say they are angry at their writing. So here are some reflections for on writing anger.

If you could fly above your life, and view it as an eagle how would it look? From this great height how big does your writing look in the context of your everyday? Where does it sit in the circle of your everyday?

If your day is anything like Joanna Average your day is probably a lumpy circle, bulging at the edges with a few blowouts on its underbelly. The circle looks like it is struggling to hold itself together because of all the demands pulling and tugging at it. The bills to be paid, work or study always on your mind, practical stuff like “what’s for dinner?” “where are my black fat pants?” (for those days when you feel bloated and misshapen), kids or partners needing something… and so on and so on… pulling and tugging until the circle looks like a warped and steaming cow pat. You feel pushed and pulled with your psychological skin stretched out of shape.

You sit down to write. You push back the edges and find 15 minutes in this overcrowded everyday. You committed to it and now you are going to do it, no matter what! You sit with your blind determination and pen poised but nothing comes. Your fingers tighten around the pen as if willing it to write something. You clench your jaw and your head wobbles as you mind does its sing-songy voice that lets you know that it thinks this is wasting time.

You sit in your determination. You make yourself stay, like training a naughty puppy. But your mind escapes to all the things you have to do today, or that daydream of the beach holiday you’ve been promising yourself for fifteen years, somewhere exotic and you feel the sun on your skin….. ah yes lovely, but your idle pen drops to the floor and pulls your attention back to the page with a jolt. You try again. Then your mad monkey mind arrives, screeching inside your head so loudly you worry it will disturb the neighbors. You throw your pen against the wall and stomp out in disgust.

This writing anger is like the frustration we feel when we decide after months of being sedentary, perhaps at the end of winter, that we’ll get fit. In the beginning all we feel is frustration. We can’t get those muscles working. We ache, and focus on all the sore spots. Nothing seems to work. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly at first our muscles strengthen, our lungs expand, the soreness lessens and we don’t go looking for our fat pants every Monday morning.

Finding and honing our writing muscles is much the same. In the beginning it can feel hard and frustrating, especially when it is difficult to find the time and the rewards are minimal or hard to see. You may wonder if writing is for you. But like exercise, giving expression to what is within is healthy for everyone and writing is the most accessible tool to do that. But you could sing to express yourself, dance it, beat it as a rhythm. Whatever you do, do something because you were all born to it, we all were. If you don’t believe me watch a 3 year old.

There is some magic that happens when we turn inward and give words to the experience of who we are, or who we are becoming that deepens our relationship with ourselves. Writing is one way to give voice to that journey into self.

Anger might also arise as you face what you have wanted to avoid or not see. An overcrowded busy life lets us ignore those monsters in the deep of our psyche and just keep rushing through our everyday.

Turning to write and ask open questions to see what emerges, such as “what do I really want?” is like turning to face the monster, or the void, the loneliness of who we are, or see who we’ve become while our attention was “out there.” Checking our phone for messages, social media catch up, emails, videos to watch, busy, busy watching the screen means there’s no need to look into our heart. Looking down today means looking out not looking in.

In the beginning as you sit down with yourself and hold your own hand by putting a pen in it, it can be hard to hear and see what is there. If you haven’t been there for a while, coming home to yourself is like visiting a foreign country and you’ve likely forgotten how to speak the language. Everything is strange at first and it can feel lonely and very tempting to rush back to what you know.

Your inner world is a vast and mysterious place that will take a lifetime to traverse. There are depths where monsters sleep and guard what is precious. Only this morning I came face to face with a drooling Cyclops, with blood under his fingernails, guarding some long forgotten treasure in the deepest recesses of my soul.

And there is the wonder of the spheres within, so vast that when you look up into the possibility of who you are, your head spins. It is dazzling.

Most of us need a vessel to travel this great and uncharted territory of self, soul, psyche, or whatever name you give it. From ancient times writing has been the vessel for many from Homer and Plato, to Shakespeare and Jung, writing has carried the soul and changed the world, and for some, it has held our sanity when everything crumbled into nothingness. It can be a light when darkness falls and a glow to follow when the path becomes a bleak wilderness.

I wish for everyone to have a friend like writing. Always there, ready to listen, never judging, just this, whatever comes. And then afterwards you can walk away, freed from your burden, as writing holds the words that your feelings have been wrapped into, like a warm blanket around a wretched infant.

And sometimes writing can reveal the possibility of who we are becoming beyond what we had dared to dream or believe. It can remind us what is best in our human Nature and make it a poem to share with other lost hearts and souls because we are all on this journey through suffering towards the glow of our own true Nature.