Writing to Understand Personal Emotions
Life consists of a large variety of emotions: joy, pain, nostalgia, sorrow, excitement, grief, love, and so much more. Sometimes it can be difficult to understand the emotions. Other times, we yearn to hold on to the emotions and feel them to the fullest. And every so often, we want to escape the emotions, as they can be too overwhelming. No matter the situation, writing can be a good outlet for the feelings we hold inside. Writing can help in three ways: releasing your emotions, understanding your emotions, and turning your emotions into something beautiful.
Releasing Your Emotions
In hard times especially, it is healthy to let out your feelings. Keeping negative emotions pent up inside can cause a myriad of negative effects. Some people bottle up their emotions for so long that one day it all becomes too much, and they release everything at once, often harming relationships in the process. Other people lock their emotions away for so long that they become numb to everything. If you don’t allow yourself to feel negative emotions, you won’t be able to appreciate the good things in life and feel positive emotions.
“You can’t have a rainbow without a little rain.” – Dolly Parton
Many times, a person will release their emotions by venting to a friend or family member. However, not everyone has that luxury, and even the people who do should have alternate methods of releasing their emotions. That is where writing is a powerful tool, especially writing with pen and paper. An article by Verywell Mind says, “Tapping letters on a screen isn’t the same as drawing out each letter of every word. Writing things down will inherently bond you to the words you write. And because of that, writing becomes quite powerful for the psyche.” Keeping a journal is a good way to release your emotions without projecting them onto other people and is the first step in understanding your emotions and turning them into something beautiful.
Verywell Mind suggests what they call “writing therapy,” which is precisely what it sounds like. Since not everyone has access to a personal therapist, and there are some people who struggle to open up, writing therapy can be an incredibly useful tool. This practice involves simply picking up a piece of paper and writing out all the thoughts you are having at the moment, whether they make sense or not.
An article by My TMS Journey says, “The key with journaling is not to tell a story, but to access the feelings that haven’t been allowed to be experienced in the body somatically.” The most important thing at that moment is simply getting the thoughts and feelings out of your head and onto paper. From there, you are able to take all those thoughts and begin to decipher the meaning hiding inside of them.
However, journals are not the only way to release emotions through writing. Even writing poetry or stories can help. Whether you infuse your flash fiction with personal emotions or write nonfiction narratives about the situations that have caused high levels of emotion, stories can be a good outlet.
Understanding Your Emotions
Once you have released all your emotions onto paper, it is time to figure out how to understand them. Unfortunately, this is typically the hardest part. Once you have released the pain inside, it isn’t easy to continue to focus on that pain. Digging deeper to understand what you are feeling requires dragging yourself through the mud, stomping your heart into the ground, and squeezing out every drop of information you can find.
Malinda King, in an article with Wildtree Wellness, outlines an exercise that she learned to help her use writing to process her emotions through a series of letters. The first letter is one of rage. For this one, King says, “Don’t hold back. Give yourself permission to say everything you wish you could say and even things you did not know you would want to say.” The next letter is one of sadness. For this one, King says, “If sadness could talk, what would it say? . . . Let yourself cry if you feel tears coming and breathe through the tears.” The goal with the first two letters is to get out all the raw emotions. The final letter is one of gratitude. For this one, King says, “After moving the emotional energy above, you will likely now have access to feelings of gratitude related to what this relationship/situation has taught you and/or how it has helped you heal and grow.” Once you have written these three letters, King instructs the reader to shred the first two letters so you can fully let go of the anger and sadness from the situation. The third letter can be kept to remind you of the things you’ve learned about the situation.
The practice of processing emotion through letters will not work for every situation or even every person, but it is a valuable option. As mentioned in the previous section, writing therapy can function in a similar manner to the letters. Once you have released all your thoughts onto the page, you can sift through and decide which emotions you felt the most deeply. Oftentimes, you will even begin to work things out as you are writing. When you let one thought lead to another without holding back, you allow yourself to unlock the true cause of the emotions you are having. This act can result in realizations you may have never expected.
Deciphering your feelings can even be done through less journal-esque writing. Turning a situation into a fictional scene can also help you understand the meaning behind your feelings. When you insert yourself into a character who is working through their emotions during a difficult time, you can learn things about yourself through the character you create. I have used fiction stories several times to work through situations from my past that I still had not let go of. It is often easier to see the answer to things when you are looking from an outside perspective. That fact is why most people turn to a friend or therapist to help them find a solution. However, when that is not an option, inserting yourself into a character can give the same effect since you are required to look upon the character from the outside.
Turning Your Emotions Into Something Beautiful
If you opt for journaling or writing therapy to understand your emotions, it is unlikely that your words will ever be seen by others. However, you can still use the newfound understanding of your emotions to create something else.
Some may choose to tear out the pages and turn them into art. Others may want to burn the pages for a more fleeting form of beauty. Another option is simply taking the things you have learned and inserting the knowledge into a story. Whether you take the emotional revelations from your journal and convert them into a story or use the story to get you to the emotional revelations, there are many reasons fiction can be a good way to convert your feelings.
Amanda Creasey, in a post on her blog, discusses a few reasons such as access to different points of view, emotional distance, specific theme, privacy, and more. Creasey says, “For some writers, the subjects they explore in their fiction may seem too threatening to convey in any other form. Somehow, fictionalizing the topic, whatever it may be—war, domestic violence, crime, regret, disappointment—makes the topic more accessible to the writer as subject matter.” Directly writing your emotions into a personal essay can feel too vulnerable, but by creating some emotional distance and inserting the emotions into a character, it becomes much easier to approach difficult topics without displaying the intense personal feelings for the world to see.
There are so many examples of literature that were written to mirror a situation the author had gone through. Although, it does not end at stories. There are also a multitude of songs and poems written to help the author express and process their emotions.
“It is Well with My Soul,” by Horatio Spafford
“It is Well with My Soul” is a popular song in the Christian community, yet few people know the story behind this song. Spafford suffered a great deal of loss during his life.
According to an article by Danielle Stringer, “His life was marked by tragedy and loss, including the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed much of his real estate holdings, and the death of his only son shortly thereafter.” That is not all he lost. Two years later, Spafford decided to take a trip to Europe with his family to get a change of scenery, but he ended up having to send his wife and children without him. On the way to Europe, the ship his family was on collided with another boat, resulting in the loss of his four daughters.
Spafford’s wife managed to get back to her husband safely, but grief greatly overwhelmed the two of them. Later, Spafford and his wife took another boat trip, and during the trip, the captain paid his condolences to Spafford as they passed over the spot where the boats had collided. On this boat trip, the words for “It is Well with My Soul” came to Spafford like a comforting hug from God. The song is now cherished by people who have also suffered loss because it reminds them, much as it reminded him, that even through the trials, life can go on.
“Dejection: An Ode,” by Samuel Coleridge
“Dejection: An Ode” is one of Coleridge’s well-known poems, but for the average person, it may not hold much significance. Regardless, it is a prominent example of poetry written about one’s personal emotions.
According to an article by Christine Nguyen, “‘Dejection’ is thought to be the product of Coleridge’s depression born of his unhappy marriage and his futile love for Sara Hutchinson; the poem was, after all, first written as a letter to his beloved Sara.” There is a great deal of depth to this poem, as it also is rooted in an overwhelming desire for Coleridge to escape his own mind through nature and imagination. However, he fails to receive this desire. In the second stanza of the poem, he speaks about the beautiful sights outside, taking time to describe the sights in front of him, yet he ends the stanza by saying, “I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!”
Coleridge is not blind to the beauty outside, but he is unable to feel any small amount of joy in seeing it anymore. This feeling is something some readers may relate to if they have fallen into a depression themselves because when you are in a depressed state, you lose the joy you once had in hobbies and the little things.
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” by Ernest Hemingway
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is one of Hemingway’s lesser-known stories, considering he is typically associated with his novel The Old Man and the Sea rather than any of his short stories. Even so, this story is one of his most powerful ones since it has some ties to his personal life tucked away inside of it.
According to an article by Paul Henderickson, “The Helen in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ is not Helen Hay Whitney, any more than the dying author named Harry is Ernest Hemingway. But there are enough allusions and parallels and associations to make clear that Hemingway knew exactly what he was doing.” This short story was littered with parallels between Hemingway’s personal life and the life of the characters he portrayed. Hemingway himself did not fall in love with “his” Helen, despite being tempted to allow her to pay for him to visit Africa. However, his character Harry was married to a Helen who portrayed very similar features and characteristics to the Helen he knew personally.
For Spafford, Coleridge, and Hemingway, writing proved to be an excellent way to not only release and understand their emotions but also to turn them into lyrics and prose that were beautiful. So many other authors throughout the years have practiced the same thing, and it is a tool that can be helpful for any person, whether they consider themselves a writer or not.
I encourage you to quit being scared to face your emotions and take the time to embrace them through your writing. It may be terrifying, but in the end, they can become something so much more than pain.
About the Author
Chloe Ballard has lived a tiny town in Idaho for most of her life but is currently finishing her senior year of college as a Professional Writing major. She has dabbled in writing since middle school, where her teachers encouraged her to lean into her creative side. She is passionate about learning new things, making art, and building stories for the benefit of others.