The writing had been going so well. Despite massive scheduling and parenting responsibilities, I’d managed to pile up blog posts. I started writing a book and had 20,000 words written in a month, mostly during baby nap time and after the kids were in bed.
And then it hit me full in the face. Precisely when the work was going well, I was smacked down by resistance.
I fumbled, I fussed, I fidgeted. I read the news, I played games on my phone. I complained about having the exact same tight schedule I’d had for a year.
I had looked forward to the first day my baby went to daycare. I was going to take my oldest for a walk, come home, and make to-do lists with a cup of coffee. Then I was going to execute those to-do lists. And I was going to read. And I was going to write. Quiet time was close at hand.
Relinquishing my baby into the arms of another woman was harder for me than I thought. He went happily and then tried to close the door on me. I tried to just laugh it off.
Now procrastinating, I took my oldest for that long, slow walk. We came home. It was quiet. That’s what I’d been longing for. But instead I curled up under the covers and cried. I cried that I was cut off from my child, and I was scared because I’d lost my excuse not to write.
I got up to make lunches. Part of me wanted to go back to sleep. Part of me told myself to write. I split the difference and read a book about resistance that a friend had recommended to me: The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield. When my friends are suggesting books on resistance, and I resist reading them, that should tell me something.
Turns out it’s a good book. And I realized I was resisting writing by lots of means. My resistance was pointing to exactly what I needed to write. And my resistance was fueled by fear.
I acknowledged, not for the first time, that I am much more afraid of success as a writer than I am of failure as a writer. If I fail, no one will even notice. If I succeed, people might have opinions about my writing, and even share them with me. I’m not sure I want that. I’m not sure what that would do to me.
Knowing that the only cure for this is to write, and to write NOW, I picked up pen and paper for the first icebreaker, to write a slightly vulnerable piece to name the resistance that is interfering with my writing. There is power in a name.
I practice a form of stream-of-consciousness writing that has saved my life. Over the years, writing out my thoughts is the single most important tool I’ve used towards becoming a fully functioning person, a person with solid relationships, meaningful work, and a sense of fullness and purpose. I wrote my way out of confusion and darkness into a life worth living.
It’s happened slowly, but it’s happened intentionally. I have done many things that have made me into a person I am glad to be, and the way I’ve figured out what I need to do is by writing.
Stream-of-consciousness writing for me is like thinking aloud on paper. I don’t have any idea what I’m going to say before I start. I have no destination in mind. That’s why I refer to it as a process, or sometimes a tool. It isn’t an end or a goal in itself.
There’s something about writing like this that allows me to see and hear my thoughts reflected back to me. That gives me this bit of distance from my thoughts. It’s almost like talking them out with another person, but I never get interrupted, and I never have to worry about being judged. And my notebook is ready and available at 2:00 a.m.
Process, Not Product
In my early twenties, I said that I wrote so much because I needed to talk more than any human being was able to listen. I was going through hell, and I needed to get it out of my head, so I got it down on paper. A journal or diary would suggest that I’m writing about events that happened and my feelings about them in a semi-coherent manner that creates a thing: a journal. My writing is not remotely about creating a thing. It’s about process, not product.
My husband calls it “clearing the pipes.” My thinking get stuck somewhere along the line, and then all the emotions get backed up and overflow into my actions. Clearing the pipes helps me think, feel, and act in a smoother, more present way.
And I never read what I just wrote. Reading it is like examining the contents of the drain clog under a magnifying glass. It’s both gross and a waste of time. My intention is to keep the drain free flowing, not to dissect the clogs. If I read my writing too quickly, I bring up all those emotions again and basically trigger myself. It becomes counterproductive.
Another way to think of it is washing clothes. The act of writing, keeping the hand moving, washes my brain. I throw in smelly, dusty, dirty laundry, and when I’m done I have clean laundry – a clear mind – and feel more like myself. The words on the page are the dirty water and lint. I’m not interested in high quality laundry lint. The words on the page are the same. Some days there’s more or less of it. It changes in color and quality. But the words are not important, and definitely aren’t the point. The clean clothes are the purpose of doing laundry.
Write It Out
When I’m in a powerfully bad mood, I go to my notebook and write it out. When I’m restless or bored, I write it out. I write down whatever thoughts are going through my head at the moment. Forget backstory and context, I start with whatever I happen to be thinking. When I’m doing stream-of-consciousness writing, I keep my hand moving. I write what comes up, as it comes to me.
This has the effect of slowing my thinking down when I’m angry or anxious and my thoughts are boiling over like a pot on the stove. When I’m depressed or sad, and my thinking is moving slow as molasses in miserable little circles, keeping my hand moving and writing what comes to me loosens and awakens my faculties, like stretching out stiff muscles after spending too much time in bed.
Once my thoughts are moving at a manageable pace, I start to feel the first hints of relief. Whatever I’m feeling becomes bearable. Once I’m writing everything out – it might take several pages first – I eventually find I have started to write about what’s really bothering me. I almost always surprise myself. I didn’t know what was behind my bad mood or wild train of thought until I sat down and wrote it all out.
Writing about what’s behind the surface thoughts and emotions, I start getting somewhere. I explore whatever it is that comes up. A new insight. A new connection. An old memory. Feelings that were hiding under the feelings. And as I get it out of my head and onto paper, I start to feel better. It’s like a good therapy session. I feel heard. And I’m also listening.
Mindfulness by the Page
For me writing is a form of mindful awareness. As I write, I not only feel my emotions, thoughts, sensations, and memories, I notice myself feeling them. That bit of distance from the emotions gives me a slightly different perspective. It gives me a taste of what I might find doing meditation practices or mindfulness exercises. I awaken an ability to observe my inner workings. And when I can observe them, I can avoid becoming overwhelmed by them. When I observe parts of myself in action, I have the opportunity to interact with them, engage with them, dialog between parts of myself and work out the differences. My inner conflicts become conversations.
At best I reclaim parts of myself, but at worst I’ve let the bad mood run its course on the page. The torrent of negative emotion has washed through, without doing further damage to my relationships. I feel like I do after a workout. A good kind of tired. Sometimes I walk away with insights and a new perspective. That’s the beginning of an awakening to a facet of myself I didn’t have awareness of before.
Those moments are key to growth in my life. Those moments give me the capacity to change. I love those moments.The clarity writing brings, day after day, year after year, has allowed me to chart the course of my life. Writing has made it possible to know myself, one word at a time.
Right to Write
There is a little book by Julia Cameron called “The Right to Write.” It’s about giving yourself permission to write down your thoughts and ideas that you hear in your head instead of trying to think up what to say. What I love most about this book is that she describes something similar to my process for writing to right myself, no matter what mood I bring to the table.
I’ve customized my process over time to suit me. But I also encourage you to try it, and to be willing to adapt this form of writing to your own needs and vary it over time. For example, I rarely write first thing in the morning, and I don’t always write every day. But when I’m anxious or depressed I’ll write several times a day in short bursts. But Cameron swears by writing first thing in the morning, every single day.
I have developed a sense for how much I need to write and when I’m done. But her recommendation of three pages of longhand is about the right length to get somewhere. If you want to type it, that’s about 750 words, and if you’re on a format that doesn’t lend itself to word counts (like emailing yourself) about 40 minutes is a good length of time for working through something. Don’t use the length as an excuse, though. If you have ten minutes to write, then take that ten minutes. It’s better than nothing.
Sometimes, though, it needs to be longer. Earlier this year, before the pandemic, I had a heartbreaking day where I was helping people I love make literal life and death decisions. I couldn’t sleep the night before, so I wrote for four hours straight. I went into the next day tired, but calm, clear, centered, and able to be present in a way I couldn’t have if I hadn’t written out all the junk in my head.
Primacy of Privacy
Don’t undermine yourself by sharing your writing with someone who might not understand the context in which it was written, and don’t write for an audience. That’s a pressure that will keep your censoring yourself as you write, which is the opposite of the effect you’re going for.
Just remember to stick with the two major guidelines: first, keep your hand moving – writing or typing whatever comes up. Second, don’t read it yourself for awhile, and don’t let anybody else read it at all. You’re not creating a piece of writing, you’re clearing the pipes or unclogging your filter. The change in your mood or perspective is the end result, not the words on the page.
Cue the Excuses
I find people are very slow on taking my word for how healing writing can be. It’s easy. Its cheap. It doesn’t have to take long. If you already can’t sleep, its not taking any extra time to do it. If you’re doomscrolling on your phone because you’re anxious, that time would be better spent writing.
My feeling is that some people give all the excuses in the world to not write for one reason: they secretly know how powerful it will be. Rather than what they say – that writing risks wasting their time – they know that writing will eventually unlock the secrets of their own minds. And then they might have to change. And change is hard and scary. But change is the only way to set things right. Write to right.
Back in middle school, we got to use the fancy microscopes three or four times. Those were my favorite days in science class. I remember feeling that a whole new world opened up that I hadn’t been able to see before. Fast forward a generation and I want to expose my own child to that incredible universe I had gotten just a glimpse of.
So I bought a microscope to use with my son the other day. His science units are starting with cells, then moving to plants, animals, fossils, and rocks, and it seemed like we could look at all sorts of things relevant to what he’s learning.
When the microscope arrived, we looked at the prepared slides that came with it and made one of our own. He was excited. I was excited. Our curiosity was piqued. Eventually, he grew tired and I carefully put it away, planning on getting it back out again a few days later for our first experiment.
Salt, Lit from Above, 100x Magnification. Copyright Brie Childress, 2020.
But then I found that I couldn’t think of anything else fun I wanted to do. Every free moment I had I was daydreaming of that microscopic world. I was googling “microscope slides for kids” and “slides to prepare for kids.” I finally admitted to myself the only reason I was adding on “for kids” was just that I don’t own all the very cool microscope accessories to do complicated things. It had nothing to do with kids.
So after everyone was in bed I got out the microscope and played by myself. I learned to prepare slides, staining a bit of my kitchen counter in the process. I raided my kitchen and craft closet for samples and prepared a dozen wet slides. A week prior, I’d never heard the term “wet slide.”
Then I found I could take photos with my cell phone, which delighted me to no end. I could share this world with other people! The iodine I used as stain gave most of my slides this lovely sepia tone effect. The high-tech approach was paired with the colors of nineteenth century photographs to peek into a strange, new world.
This fresh sense of perspective in the world around me awoke something in me. I had always cognitively acknowledged it on one level but was now truly mindful of it on another level. This microscopic universe was everywhere. And it has scale!
The bacteria were tiny dots under my highest power lens. At least I think that’s what those dots in the probiotic were. But onion and mouth cells were huge. Red blood cells were much smaller than the mouth cells but far larger than the bacteria.
Silk fibers, so soft on a macro scale, I can see under the microscope have ridges and hooks on the edges of the fibers, which lock together under hot water and friction (i.e. in the washing machine.) Cotton fibers were smooth and flattened, but the fibers kinked in places. The cotton was so much rougher on the normal level, I wouldn’t have suspected their contrasting qualities. It fascinated me how dramatically different two strands of threads looked under the microscope.
At some point I had to put the microscope away for the night. But I pondered the world that was opening up to me. I mulled over the closeness of a world beyond my eyes and senses that I don’t usually interact with knowingly and directly, but it influences me greatly, and I influence it. And the chance to visit this parallel universe, if only to glimpse it, was profoundly moving.
It was an entirely different experience than googling “onion cells” and studying the images. I could have seen even sharper images online than the ones I’m showing here. But that sense of being transported into another realm, where the normal appearances of everyday objects is changed, made it something completely different. It became a journey.
In learning how to prepare slides – reading online and then trying and failing a few times before really understanding the process – I gained a sense of mastery over the connection between me and that microscopic world. I’m not at the mercy of an outside source to bring me information back. I get to experience it for myself any time I want to.
Reflecting further, I related this visit as Asimov’s “Fantastic Voyage” – where his character was in a ship shrunken down to a size smaller than a cell and traveled through the human body – to my relationship with other worlds that are barely visible to me.
My intuition – that sense in my gut of what is compelling or repelling, the part of me that knows what I know – is a sense I’ve had to work at over the years to learn to see and listen to. It’s subtle, and it’s easily disregarded by my overworked rational brain, but it’s just as real and just as valid. And whether I’m aware of it or not, it has an influence over the rest of me, and my logical mind has influence over it. But they are just as mysterious to each other as the world I see with my eyes and the world I see with my microscope.
Not everyone is going to have a spiritual experience looking through a microscope. Maybe that’s not your thing. I understand that. But there is something out there that can give you a fresh sense of perspective, a sense of wonder. Something to stir your curiosity.
Maybe you prefer a telescope, a mountaintop, or a waterfall. Maybe it’s the code programmed to run your favorite video game, or maybe it’s the ocean. Maybe it’s seeing the world through the eyes of a young child. Maybe it’s a cathedral, or just standing on your own roof and gazing out while you’re supposed to be cleaning the gutters.
It’s not very hard to find opportunities to visit these parallel worlds if you open yourself up to look. For $30, Amazon can deliver a microscope in two days. But you have to be willing to step outside your assumptions and routines just enough to open yourself up to something that may change you – a different perspective.
Back in late April, the lockdowns were shifting from fairly novel to routine, and we were finding a rhythm with them. Even though the news was anxiety-provoking, I noticed that I didn’t feel all that bad. And on some level, I was actually enjoying myself.
Then I felt guilty for being happy. Didn’t the news say that the world was burning to the ground? What was wrong with me? Did I enjoy misery? How could I be so callous as to be okay?
I’ve never been good at keeping a daily gratitude journal, but I’ve always liked the idea. So every once in a while I sit down and write about what I’m grateful for. This time I wrote a list of things I was grateful for because of the pandemic. Not in spite of the pandemic, like my health and my house, but rather things I have because of the pandemic that I wouldn’t have without it.
My list came easily and was quite varied. 4) My oldest child being home from school meant he bonded with his baby brother in a way that will last a lifetime. 15) The watermelon pajama pants I bought on Amazon made me smile. 23) I finally painted the kitchen cabinets because I ran out of excuses. They looked great.
Once I made my list, I had evidence to myself about why I was happy. Proof that I didn’t revel in misery – rather my own little bubble was actually pretty nice. I’ve worked hard over the years to get to this place in my personal life. And so that realization made it okay to be okay. I still care about humanity even though I don’t freak out every day.
Then in mid-August I found myself beginning to let resentment for 2020 seep in around the edges. The routine was getting old. My little bubble was showing signs of wear and tear.
Resentment is a poison that kills us slowly and painfully, morphing us into something else, a shadow of ourselves. Gratitude is the surest cure. So I got my pen out and started another list: How am I grateful for the pandemic?
It was much harder this time around.
I got off to a slow start. 3) I finally incorporated telehealth into my practice. 4) I’ve rediscovered canned biscuits and cut-and-bake cookies. 5) In telehealth, no one can see the ten pounds I’ve gained eating canned biscuits and cut-and-bake cookies.
I was downright passive-aggressive toward my self-assigned exercise. Eventually, though, I started gaining some steam. 9) My baby has been exposed to so few people he hasn’t even caught a cold. 12) The desk we bought for my son’s Virtual School is actually pretty cool. 14) I’m meeting with a friend by Skype every week, when we used to be “too busy” to get together. 17) I’m a third of the way through a massive cross stitch project that is just beautiful, and I’ll finish it if this goes on long enough.
This time the list wasn’t about being okay with being okay. It was about keeping as far as possible from the dark abyss that is despair. Resentment can be the start of a powerful downward pull, and there’s nothing like gratitude to save ourselves from the depths. I needed those tangible reminders that I’ve had some key wins this year, a lot of growth, and even had some fun. It doesn’t minimize the fact that it’s been a hard year and a lot of difficult things have happened, but gratitude reminds me it’s also been a transformative year.
I think it’s important to note what a gratitude list is not. It is not an exercise in “the power of positive thinking.” It is not forcing yourself to think happy thoughts and believe everything is okay. The way I do them, gratitude lists are about acknowledging that, “Yes, things are hard right now, but what else is true?” It’s that, “What else is true?” that helps us pull back from the impulse of all-or-nothing thinking. It softens the edges and opens us up to being multidimensional people.
Gratitude lists often make me feel better. But they aren’t solely about feeling better. They’re about seeing the bigger picture. Balance. Perspective. We could all use a little balance.
The gratitude list exercise is a good, multipurpose tool. I keep it in my toolbox for times when there’s friction between my emotional state and my situation. I’ve never regretted writing one.
Whether you find yourself wondering why you’re okay in these crazy times, or wondering if you’ll make it through, I challenge you to write your own list. What are your gifts from the pandemic?
This has been a difficult year. The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted human life on every scale. We have international finger-pointing. Nationally, a lack of leadership and political partisan division drives the narrative. At the state level we have budget shortfalls and shifting policies. Local governments are left to manage mask requirements and school formats. Meanwhile, individuals and families are trying to figure out how to pay the bills and stay healthy at the same time.
There have been countless decisions and changes at all levels coming in rapid-fire succession. And there’s no end in sight.
In this global stressor that is upending our daily lives, we’re having some strong emotional reactions. A lot of strong reactions. Anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, grief, depression, helplessness, despair, and restlessness, among others.
The New York Times reported that in June 2019 about one in twelve people in the U.S. met the criteria for an anxiety disorder. In June 2020, one in three people met the same criteria. Basically, we’re all on tilt.
Tilt is the poker term for when something happens in a game – maybe a bad beat, a series of losses, or another player’s bad manners – and we get too emotional. Then we start making poor decisions because we’re emotionally reactive. Maybe we start taking big risks. Maybe we fold every hand. But we’re no longer playing at our best.
In poker, the right course of action when we find ourselves on tilt is to step away from the table: change the scenery, eat a snack, and take a walk to regain equilibrium. Unfortunately, we can’t step away from the table right now. Opting out of the pandemic isn’t possible. The people who are trying are simply in denial.
We all must play the game as the cards are dealt. That leaves us trying to do the best we can under the circumstances.
I’ve noticed the telltale reactivity in myself. Anxiety has been my predominant emotional response, followed by immobilization and exhaustion. It’s felt like one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake, and it’s wearing me out.
For too long I was immersing myself in the news, which fueled my anxiety. I felt driven to read it, but I was left drained and helpless. The problems were too big for me to solve, and it felt as if it were my sole responsibility to solve the world’s problems – no one else was stepping up.
Eventually I had to pull back from reading the news. I’m now checking in to find out what’s going on, but I’m no longer soaking my brain in stress hormones for hours at a time.
I came to accept that the only problems I can control in the situation involve my immediate sphere. So, I shifted my attention to my locus of control: my actions, my immediate family’s actions.
At first, I tried to play a no-stakes game. I locked down my household to almost no exposure to outside germs. My husband was working from home, and I was on maternity leave, so it was possible to try this route.
We bought everything online that we possibly could. We didn’t go to stores or restaurants except for drive-thrus and one trip to the grocery store every three weeks. I went grocery shopping wearing a construction-grade N100 respirator I bought several years ago for stripping paint and spraying pesticide.
Even though our older family members were going out and about more freely than we were, I tried my best to protect them from the virus. I kept my children away from their grandmothers out of a silent terror that a hug was going to kill them all – old and young. It would be my fault when everybody died, and I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. My anxiety was feeding on itself.
Then a few things happened. My fragile newborn became a healthy infant, and the doctor’s directions changed. Instead of going straight to the hospital in the case of a fever, we were to take Tylenol and call the office for a virtual appointment. The stakes were lowered a little bit.
Next my husband had to go back to work in an office full of people. I had to face that we were going to have some level of exposure to the outside world.
But most of all, I finally got tired of constantly losing.
It was like I was throwing money into the pot every hand, and then promptly folding. I was working so hard, but I was miserable, my family was miserable, and it was simply not sustainable. Knowing it would be many months or longer to wait for a vaccine, I had to make some changes. I couldn’t hide in a house-shaped bunker any longer.
My solution is to play a low-stakes game. While my no-stakes game had worn me down, at least I’d known what my strategy was. Switching to low stakes requires a bit more finesse, but there is enough payoff to keep me enjoying life.
For me, low stakes mean getting out of the house and going into the office and seeing clients by telehealth from there. I like my office, and I need the change of scenery. It’s a big payoff for a small amount of risk.
While husband had to go back to work, we bought him the nicest masks we could find. I even found reusable silicone N99 masks that are comfortable and keep us safer out in the world. We can interact with other people and buy fresh food without much anxiety.
We resumed our weekly dinners with the extended family. I even let the grandmothers hold the baby. But now we’re eating at picnic tables outdoors. It’s the lowest-risk setting for decade-long tradition.
I came to terms with the fact that I am voluntarily accepting a little bit of risk, balanced with a lot of responsibility. I know part of that responsibility is to stay connected in the world for the sake of my loved ones and my sanity, and part of it is to reduce the spread of a deadly disease.
A low-stakes game is requiring a more measured approach and less emotional reactivity on my part. But it’s also lowered my anxiety, freed me up to act, and given me more energy in the present moment.
The key is awareness. Once we’re aware of our deficits, we can decide how to compensate. If we’re blind to them, we’re in danger of shifting from being on tilt to spinning out of control.
We each need to take a deep breath and acknowledge the emotional roller coaster ride. Once we accept that our first reactions might not be our best reactions, we can shift from playing no-stakes, high-stakes, or a haphazard mix to playing a sustainable low-stakes game. That way we can get through this time as physically, mentally, and emotionally intact as possible.
