I’ve Started Writing.
I promised myself I would write only about those things I experienced personally.
Unless you experience something directly, your knowledge of any event is only an abstraction.
We all have deeply embedded experiences that we have access to. It’s an untapped well of rich, yet most of the time painful, experiences that should be surfaced and shared in written form.
Why share them? You become healthier.
All that is hidden reinforces the natural anxiety that we each possess from birth.
Anxiety is a contributor to many of the sicknesses and diseases that contribute to emerging cancers, heart complications, breathing disorders, and diabetes.
In other words, anxiety is there from the beginning, ironically, to be nurtured. That’s one of those funny little tricks life plays on us. That’s what is meant by being self-destructive.
To soften anxiety, you can share it by writing about it. Sharing makes anxiety softer and smaller.
At a minimum anxiety is probably epigenetic. Going from the womb to the world places a permanent mark on us. The mark of anxiety. Throughout life we build on that anxiety by what we experience but are not obliged to share.
Here’s a repressed memory I have not shared with anyone until this very moment.
One night in my junior year of high school, I came home from a date. I didn’t feel well. I went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror and became disgusted at the large welt under my right cheek.
What was it? A blood blister, an infected area of some kind? I pressed on it. A mixture of blood and puss came out. At that point I should have left it alone. Instead I squeezed it. Nothing more came out, but I noticed that the area where I squeezed had caved in. I was stunned at how it looked. I tried padding it in hopes it would return to its normal shape. It wasn’t to be.
The next morning at breakfast my mother asked what happened to the area below my cheek. She said it looks like you are going to have a scar there. And so it was. A scar I have to this very day.
It doesn’t bother me until I look in the mirror, which is every day.
Do I feel better now that I have shared the experience with you? At this moment, the issue feels smaller. It doesn’t look as big as I have conjured images of it in my mind.
Letting loose of repressed memories gives no aid to the natural anxiety we are born with.