Reflecting: the Mirror Becomes Clear
Hello all,
Welcome back to our beautiful, chaotic, and messy shores. Thank you so much for taking your time and energy to sail the seas back here, to me, this week. I hope you’re feeling healthy, happy, and peaceful this week. I, personally, have had a pretty calm and peaceful week. Not too much has really gone on, so I have had a lot of time to reflect, think, and write. The other day, I completed one of my favorite notebooks, each page is covered from front to back… Before jumping into a brand new notebook, a brand new headspace, a brand new home for my thoughts, tears, and love… I decided to take some time and go through the mind of the version of myself that I am now exiting out of… It’s very interesting to see the many changes I’ve gone through in the year and a half that I've kept this notebook. This papered world became so much more than just a creative outlet for my thoughts; it became a home for my heart, my emotions, my tears…my everything. I’ve always had a deep love for writing, but in the last year and half, it’s evolved from a deep love to a burning passion. Since I always try my hardest to be as open and raw and honest as possible with you, I though that it’d be fun to give you an insight into my first journal entry, and reflect on it, as it truly helped the inspiration for this website, my passion for writing, and the person I am discovering myself to be…
This particular entry has to do with trauma as I had the intention of making this a “self-work” notebook…
Poem off to the side: “The clouds above my head let the raindrops fall onto the scars of my trauma so that they may grow flowers big enough to hide the pain.”
The idea of this entry was to draw out what trauma looks like to myself, it came from an exercise I learned in therapy during the time. This little illustration is an exact depiction of how I was feeling and seeing the trauma I was trying so desperately to shed… I felt that it was this thundercloud over my head and anytime I though I had healed from it, hid it, or ran away from it, it was right there, booming in my ear…reminding me that the storm isn’t very far away. It’s eye-opening seeing how instead of facing my issues, trauma, etc… head on or make subtle little changes to actually heal from it, I’d runaway from it…but, unresolved issues, trauma, etc… always have a faster way of catching up. In a way, I’ve learned to bring myself closer to pain instead of letting it push me away.
These are parts 2 & 3 to the same exercise… my therapist knew about how much I write, so to help me gain more introspection and self-awareness, he’d help create these different writing exercises for myself and my poetry… The idea of part 3, where I selected 4 words or phrases from the little poem I wrote was to get an idea of where my headspace and emotions truly were at to start diagnosing what issues/situations/trauma were igniting these feelings…
Poem: “Looking through the broken mirror, I can now see everything differently. The reflection of hidden pain began slowly unwrapping into scars that hugged my body like a daisy chain.”
I believe that what I was trying to say to myself in this poem, is that it’s okay to surrender to your emotions, problems, trauma, etc… or at least I was trying to convince myself that it is okay to do so. I’ve always struggled with surrendering to these common issues and recently I have been learning that if we can’t surrender, we can’t accept, and if we can’t accept then there’s no way we can begin to heal and move on…
Thank you so much for taking your time and energy to read this weeks journal, I appreciate it more than I could ever truly express. Make sure to sail these beautiful blue seas back here next week for more!
With great love always,
M.H. John