Don’t forget to write it all down
Today I’m sharing an essay I wrote in the summer of 2020. I know I’m far from alone in considering that year a year of painful transformations. My marriage was unraveling and I was on my own for the first time in a long time, unsure if and when I would feel secure in partnership again. I was desperately lonely, longing for connection, intimacy, attention. And I was so angry - at everything, including myself.
One of the most important things I did that year was begin writing morning pages, a daily practice of writing 3 stream of consciousness pages as soon as possible upon waking. This practice is the foundation of The Artist’s Way, a workbook by Julia Cameron, which I had begun earlier that year. The morning pages got me writing everyday, beyond those first 3, and I began embracing writing as a healing practice, a way to express my anger and to cope with the chaos of my days. I found myself writing about everything I saw, big and small, and a selection of those observations eventually became my book, Attention.
I’ve kept a journal off and on my whole life, but it wasn’t until that year of loss that writing became a way to see myself more clearly, by way of shameless expression within the pages of my notebook. I held nothing back - the morning pages had freed me from the critic in my head that had previously required constant revision. Free-writing allowed me to be more honest with myself; I could no longer deny the pain I was in when I was writing about it each day. The growing stack of composition notebooks at my bedside were evidence that something had to change.
The essay below was born out of all of this note taking. I wrote it after one of the first times in 2020 that I felt truly happy to be in my own company, grateful for a peaceful moment by myself. I was in the habit of writing daily so it felt natural to document it. When I re-read the essay today, 3 years later, I was immediately transported to that late afternoon in the forest and the vital shift toward self romance that occurred there, and I’m grateful that I wrote it all down.