Writing Thoughts
This has nothing to do with the blog, other than ocean peacefulness we all need to see :)
I’ve been observing my brain in this current chaos and I’m noticing writing has held a unique challenge within this space.
Writing has held such a healing power throughout my life. I was always a big journaler; this blog has come as an easy extension of that, and an extended challenge of that. My journaling has decreased quite a bit with my increase in writing Happy Thoughts and I have found that interesting to observe.
We’re in a window of time that writing is my friend again and I’m running with it! (Or… I’m slowly trudging through the mud with it… ) There is something to be said for the fact that I’m struggling to write while my entire life has become about writing these thoughts down.
Writing those thoughts, thousands and thousands of times, has changed my brain in ways I could never have planned for or imagined. There are some pretty wild things happening in Happy Thought land and my lil changed brain is struggling to hold it all. This healing brain feels a lot like my hurting brain and it makes me think of that pendulum again.
I’ve written about the similarity of feelings between healing and hurting, the challenge to attend to details and keep important things in my head. Right now feels similar to when my brain felt like it had holes in it. I felt like such a failure at that time, like I couldn’t do the smallest thing right. I remember it feeling so taxing to refill my water filter and thinking, this is such an easy task Kristin, “how can you not even do that??” but I couldn’t. I could barely stay awake past 6:00pm.
I was recently asked to write down major challenging events that changed my life, all I could say was ages 25-33. When I turned 33, I decided that I’d tried giving myself away for long enough (and by decided, I mean I was sucker punched yet again and FINALLY said “enough!”) I thought I’d see what I could do keeping me, to find the feeling I was looking for from others within myself. It felt entirely radical to do things simply because they sounded good to me. I was camping alone when I made the decision to officially move to California, and within four months I was living in San Diego with a contract job I had dreamt up. By the next year I was working in a different position that I had dreamt up and when the world shut down, I had literally said the day before, “I can’t do this anymore.”
I didn’t actually want either of the jobs I dreamt up here, they were just better than the current battle I was in. I tried to continue working as a speech pathologist for 10 years; I changed jobs at least 10 times in 10 years in as many settings as I could muster. I thought if I just find where I fit within this niche, I will find a way to be happy. It took me 10 years to consider, maybe it wasn’t my place in the niche, maybe it was the niche itself.
I think the bravest unseen moment is when we take a moment to consider, no matter how far in we are (the further in, the braver) that maybe we want something different simply because we want something different. Not because there is a 6 figure salary in it, not because there is a potential marriage at the end of it, not because we could look a certain way or we could have something to show, simply because it felt good to consider.
Some of my favorite Happy Handout moments are when there’s a big group passing and I ask the first person if they want a Happy Thought and they say “no thanks,” then I continue asking each person passing and one person within the group says “yes.” This moment is always so brave to me, to say yes in a group saying no and do the thing you want to do. There’s gumption in that! There are many times that more people within the group come back and get a Happy Thought after that one “yes” and I find it so interesting and wonderful to observe. That person saying yes gave permission to others to say yes, it made the people saying no question why they were saying no and consider changing their mind, which is a huge thing to do! They’re teeny tiny moments and everything to me.
Saying yes to yourself gives others permission to say yes to themselves; I think it would be pretty cool to live in a world where saying “yes” to ourselves was the most common thing ever, what a domino effect that would have :)