Talking to friends is a great way to vent and get things off your chest.
However, I hate bringing negative energy around the people that I love. Although it may seem that way, this has less to do with preserving my image or the ‘mask’ I present myself as. It has more to do with the fact that projecting negative thoughts and feelings onto others is not especially beneficial to anyone.
So, I feel like writing things down for myself allows me to actually work through them.
I have always had a scatterbrain. I feel like my mind never focuses on one thing. I am thinking about my articles due Tuesday, “The Wire” filming for BUTV10 Wednesday morning and Water Polo practice Wednesday night.
This disarray also applies to more pressing issues and personal problems. I am sure you have experienced it too — that awful thought spiral where one thing on top of the other seems to be going wrong, and you get overwhelmed. That’s life.
In my experience, writing is a way to untangle this thought spiral and break it down into more manageable pieces.
Writing for yourself is a practice that I learned this past summer when I discovered the importance of mindfulness. This practice taught me so much, from gratitude to meditation to journaling. However, writing has always been close to my heart.
In elementary school and middle school, my dad signed me up for every extracurricular math course you could imagine. Kumon and Mathnasium were both forced into my life. However, I naturally gravitated toward English class. I always wrote my own songs in a little notebook that I brought everywhere with me and I attempted to write novels on my mom’s first MacBook. I always had characters and stories running through my thoughts. And from a young age, I made sure to keep track of them.
In high school, I was always one of the people that sat in the front during English class. You probably would have thought I was trying to win over the teacher, when in reality, fostering close relationships with my teachers was simply a bonus to participating in the discussion. While my peers dreaded the 28-page research paper we had to write for AP Literature, I reveled in it. Creating my thesis was so rewarding and drafting a 28-page paper was a lot less work than it seemed like from the start.
Writing is timeless in the way that it lasts forever. The above-mentioned research paper was submitted to BU as part of my application, and here I am. The feeling of finishing a good piece of writing is similar to finishing the last lap in a swim meet, getting an A on a test you studied really hard for, or arriving at the airport for a tropical vacation. It’s liberating.
There are so many things about writing that are beneficial. Practicing writing every day holds me accountable. Writing for the newspaper in high school and college provides me with a creative outlet. Like I mentioned, writing makes you more introspective and aware of your feelings, which has gotten me through trying times. I also find that it helps with creativity in my day-to-day life. Not to mention writing is required in most fields of work.
Writing is a practice that completes me. I know not everyone is a “writer,” and that’s okay. I still encourage you to write every day because it improves so many facets of your life. However, if it is not writing, I encourage you to find another practice that enhances your understanding of yourself and brings happiness to your daily life.
