Daily Musing: Emotional Writing

Good Afternoon.

I spent the morning taking a long, and well needed shower, and then cleaning around the bathroom. My mind is stuck on another piece I’m writing, and I’ve tried to write a few poems to post, but each time I’ve struggled to keep it positive and not cry while writing it.

Normally this isn’t a huge issue, often my content has a bit of a sad tone to it, but I wanted to write something happy. I want to feel happy. However, when I start and try, it devolves into what the reality of the situation now is, which is tremendously depressing.

I wish I could go back and feel how I did when I was a kid. I wasn’t the happiest, and I had my issues back then too, but they were different. More shallow perhaps? Not in the colloquial sense, but meaning lacking depth, which I attribute to understanding.

I understand so much more of the world now, and whenever I try to write, it’s really hard to not try to draw attention to all the things that are wrong. I want my writing to be impactful. I want to be able to help people feel like they aren’t crazy, or aren’t alone.

I saw a Reddit post last night that was a mother asking why she had to feel so bad about not wanting to work and wanting to stay home to be with her kids more, and it’s because we’ve allowed that sort of expectation to permeate our society. It’s not okay to miss work. Maternity leave can be as short as two months, when we know, scientifically (and emotionally, morally, spiritually), it’s better for everyone for both parents to be home for the first two years of a child’s life.

I know I’m not the only one who is unhappy about the world and my country (United States). I see posts online talking about medical care, for instance a man who took an 8-minute helicopter ride for a medical emergency and was charged $30,000, where someone from another country said he was airlifted from an emergency and didn’t get a bill at all. It’s just insane to me (and many others) how little we care about human life.

It’s really hard to not be emotional when I’m writing. I used to be very good at it. Of course, I was writing scientific papers that had to be objective, accurate, and concise, but I could still write fiction/fantasy/poetry and not feel as much as I do now.

It’s not all bad, I think writing with feeling is important, but at the same time, it makes it very difficult to write something with a tone that doesn’t match how I’m feeling.

Mind you, I could change how I’m feeling. I learned back in college thinking methods for physically altering the neurotransmitters in my brain. I can literally think myself into being happy, but how genuine is that?

I’ve tried, and done a decent job I think, of being really genuine and transparent in my writing on the blog, which has resulted in some drafts that I don’t know if I’ll ever publish because of the severity of my feelings at the time. I try to write when I feel like I can still be coherent in my thoughts, and not become so emotional that I can’t separate my subjective feelings from the objective and correct outlook.

I’m not in a place today where I can write much positive stuff, which is fine since the other piece I’m working on later isn’t all that positive anyway (may tease it in the future, I don’t know yet), not at the place in the story where I’m at.

I wanted to have something sensible for today to put up, but I’m going to use my emotions today to hopefully fuel some other writing I’m working on. I’ve also recently gone from feeling very down, to up quite a bit with the support I’ve received from my family regarding my blog and lifestyle choices, and I think perhaps I’m just coming down from the dopamine high.

Yesterday was a productive day in a few ways, and an unproductive day for my writing. I should’ve written some poetry yesterday but alas, as you know, I was working on setting up this new domain.

Poetry is one of the few non-fiction kinds of writing I really enjoy, but my favorite is fantasy. Both are genres that I feel can be influenced by emotion, and perhaps why I’ve found myself drawn to them. Given that I’m not feeling fantastic today, I plan to use that for something, hopefully productive, which may improve my mood later on in the week.

Until then,

JMSV