When my heart is broken that's what I try to do. I try to pick up the pieces and bravely find beauty. I turn my sadness, my brokenness, my trauma into art. I write of darkness and hope. I write of crying and grieving. I write of carrying on even if that means sitting down to cry.
I have recently realized that part of this need to create art with my brokenness is because I have far too many feelings to leave them bottled up inside. They well up, they overwhelm and then they overflow into what I do.
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| This is Strach the Opossum, he is currently reading the Highly Sensitive Person and some Poetry by W.E. Henley and doing a bit of journaling. |
I'm reading a book called The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D. In it she has some very interesting research that talks about sensitive people. Roughly 20% of the population is sensitive. It is a real, measurable and scientifically proven trait. And yes, we do feel everything more deeply. This has to do, in short, with mirror neurons. The way that mirror neurons work is that if you watch someone else kick a soccer ball your brain will have activity in the same area that moves the leg etc. Because even just watching someone else do something, your brain processes the movements and so forth, so you feel a tiny fraction of what they are doing or feeling.
They've done lots of research that I won't bore you with here, that proves that highly sensitive people have much more activity in their mirror neurons. What does that mean? That means that when you tell us a sad story, we empathize much more deeply than 80% of the population. We really do feel it more. You can read more about her book and blogs on the Highly Sensitive Person Website.
What that means for me is I feel everything so intensely that it often overflows or overwhelms me. In the last few weeks I've been struggling to re-contextualize many of the struggles I've had all my life with this new knowledge that I'm not just "weak" or "too sensitive", that I'm actually processing and feeling more than 80% of my fellow men. So, I'm frequently up crying about a story that someone has told me, hours after they've forgotten it. I have trouble sleeping during this time of intense injustice and death. I fear for the lives of everyone struggling with the unseen menace of Covid-19 and the insidious disease of Racism. And I feel it all so very deeply that I can't sleep.
So, I must do something. I often carry the burdens of other people's sadness long after it's healthy for me to do so. I wrote about a person I met only once and couldn't stop thinking about in my post The Loneliness of a Stranger. Often I feel sad for people I can't help. I worry about people I'll never see again. And I sometimes catch myself feeling glum about abandoned objects. I personify them and feel sad for their loneliness. It's too much. So I write. I write about the sadness and I write about hope.
I've written multiple posts about the heart and the heaviness that can live there. I've written The Heart is the Final Frontier, and When a Glass Heart Shatters, and Mending a Heart of Glass. In those I talk of hardships and how I dealt with them, the way I grieved and my new theory that it takes nine months to rebuild and repair a heart and I think it's no coincidence that it's the same amount of time it takes to create a brand new heart.
I've written of hardships but also of hope, of love and support. I wrote about rekindling broken dreams in Stars in the Darkness.
I make art with my heartbreak. If it helps one person feel less alone it was worth sharing. If it is only read by me, but it allows me to sleep, it's worth writing.
And lately I've decided to try to make more positive beautiful things to fill the world with joy. Don't get me wrong, I'll still write about sadness and darkness. I think toxic positivity is a blight. It denies us the true depth of feelings and the ability to heal through grief and sitting with and working through our sadness. You cannot just plaster a smile on some things and pretend you don't need to feel. It's not healthy or productive. But that being said, while I do need to cry and grieve, and talk about my sorrows, I always want there to be hope. Just like I wrote poetically about the journey through happiness, depression and back in Winter Without Happiness. I still talk about the darkness, but I don't leave it there, I try to always end with hope.
So, of late, I have been trying to fill the world with hope and joy and beauty. I'm trying to take my fears and my anxieties and acknowledge them but gently put them to the side and make beautiful things anyway. I've been trying to write a book and it's hard and I'm nervous about not being good enough. What if I don't do the story justice? What if I write it poorly? What if I don't portray my characters fairly? What if I really don't have any idea what I'm doing and it all fails horribly?
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| This is my writing buddy, the opossum named Strach. He looks capable doesn't he? |
If you had to characterize my inner fears and nature as an animal, I'm an opossum. I'm a terrified baby opossum, with my mouth open swaying back and forth from terror. About to pass out from fright. It's not pretty. It's pathetic really (in a melodramatic and slightly comical way). So I ordered myself a tiny plush opossum friend to sit beside my computer when I try to write. I've named him Strach, the Czech word for fear. Whenever I get nervous I look at Strach and I pet him nicely, talking to him softly with compassion, and I reassure him and my fears, and then I keep writing.
And this is so common for all creatives to have crippling doubts and horrible unspoken fears of unworthiness. I've been trying to address this inner fear, this inner critic, this inner doubter with calm logic. Because these overwhelming fears don't hold up with logic. What if I can't do justice to the story? Then I will make edits until I do. What if I write it poorly? I will learn to write better through practice and I'll make edits. What if I don't portray my characters fairly? I'll have readers help tell me how they feel and I'll write a second draft. What if I really don't have any idea what I'm doing and it all fails horribly? I can only fail if I stop trying. I'll learn what I don't currently know and keep working on it til it works. I like to address these because there's usually a secret fear under those that comes out last. For instance, it'll go something like. What if I'll never be good enough? Or, I don't know anything! And you feel so much better if you say, I am good enough to try and I'll keep learning til I get there. Or, I know lots of things! And I can always learn more.
So, I'm trying to gently set aside fear and anxiety and hurt and write of hope and beauty. I'm trying to make art with all the broken pieces of my heart.
And if it takes me an entire lifetime of creating beautiful things to make up for the pain and sorrow I've witnessed, then it will be a life well lived.
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