Self-love, journal writing and letter writing to heal.

It’s been a while since I last blogged something.

Life has been both interesting and uninteresting.  I’ve had a lot of thinking to do, a lot of ‘down time’ has been needed to recover from the emotional stresses and strains of my working life.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading, the latest books are about using a journal as a method of self-love and healing oneself from the events of the past.  Something I need to do.

I have kept a journal for many years now, and I do vent and rant in it and find my way to some kind of clarity.  I have become a little disheartened at times as I seem to end up ranting about the same things over and over.  The books I have read ( Writing to Heal by Jacqui Malpass and Journalution: Journal writing to heal your life and manifest your dreams by Sandy Grason) have shown me that this isn’t a problem, that it may take many times through the same thing to come to clarity, forgiveness (of self and others) and to let go and move on.  In other words, I need to be kinder to myself and not be such an overachieving perfectionist!  And I mean that kindly

My plans for my journal today are to make a list of people who I need to write letters to for the hurts done to me in the past (even if such hurt and pain was not their intent) and to people I’ve not had ‘completion’ with. These letters that will never be sent but will allow me to let out of myself the anger, fear, hate, upset, disappointment and so on, and work my way towards forgiving them and myself.

I’ve swallowed down hurt and upset and anger and fear and so many more emotions with copious quantities of food.  The emotional reactions have been locked away, though they burst out at times, quite explosively at times, and it scares me that this ‘ice maiden’ has such energetic emotions.  I’ve spent a lifetime of nearly fifty years suppressing my feelings, not sharing how I feel with others for fear of rejection, embarrassment  conflict, hatred.  I’m not good at putting into words what I think and feel if I’m upset in anyway.  I am, however, much better at writing things down, as shown in my journaling of the past decade or so.

I won’t keep the letters either.  I’m going to burn each one as it’s finished.  If I need to return to the same person or group of people over and over again to clear things up for me, then I will do so.  I will keep doing this until I can write a letter that forgives them, and one that forgives me too.

Some of the letters may be apologies for the way I behaved.  I do have a tendency to cut people off, dead, if they upset me or betray me in any way.  To keep myself safe, I walk away, ignore them when they are around.  If I’m expected to work with them I can be cold and short with my words, protecting myself with such a thick wall of icy feelings and icy words.

This is kind of a scary thing to do.  It’s not the first time I’ve tried this, but this time has the feeling of ‘the time is now’ about it.  Pennies have dropped about the purpose of the letter writing, of letting out all the things I’ve kept bottled up for years inside me in a controlled manner, the writing being the control.

Art

Art has been pretty much on hold as I struggle with the idea that I deserve to love myself, finding out what self-love and self-esteem are all about, and just letting ideas filter through the conscious to the unconscious mind.  Inspiration for art has been, maybe not lacking, but put on the back burner for a while.  However, there are some creations, some that are works in progress, others that are finished pieces.