Pause to Breathe is a real story. It is my story.
I have stopped writing the story for a while as I am trying to work out a bit on the structure of the incidents. I don’t want to go put events in the order that they happened. I want it to be more how you start with one thing and then you get into another thing and then you dive deeper and deeper. It should look like how a mind works.
Last week, I met two of my schoolmates and we started talking about good old days. We revived memories and joked about the times gone by.
The next day, I recalled a part of our conversation where one of them tried to make fun of how I disliked teachers because they did something wrong to me.
No, this post is not about why the teacher shouldn’t have done what they did or about where my friend failed to understand my dislike for that teacher. That’s a story for another time.
Naturally, I tried to recreate the conversation in hopes of coming up with better answer to defend my dislike for that teacher.
Then my thoughts wandered to another teacher we had talked about. Out of nowhere, I recalled an incident which was an important part of my story (Pause to Brreathe) but I had completely forgotten that it happened. It was buried somewhere deep inside in my memory.
The revival of this memory helped me to connect more dots. I was reminded of a WhatsApp chat that had more details not just about the incident but about my story as a whole. It was quite a long conversation over a period of 24 hours (Yes, I talk a lot on chats. I am an insane serial-typist!!) and I’m yet to complete reading it.
If you’ve been keeping up with my Medium blogs, you know that I have taken initiative to start conversations around mental health. I have opened up about my story with some people in the last few months. While sharing my story, I knew I remembered the most important incidents and had forgotten the less important ones that connected them. And for doing justice to my story and myself, I need to have the connecting links too.
This whole episode made me realise that I should write more because my brain has buried more memories than I can ever think.
I am trying to maintain a habit of writing a daily journal. It’s not just about what all happened on a particular day, but also about what I thought about, or a revived memory or anything. I don’t know if I’ll be regular because I have tried it in the past and horribly failed. But this time I have a stronger reason to write.
Do you have a daily journal?
Do you think writing helps you understand yourself better?
Do you revisit your old journals?
Randomness Inked 
I don’t have a daily journal, so my only writing is my blog with exception when I once written letters to burn in therapy. But yes, no matter what form of writing, I think writing helps.
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Yes, writing does help a lot of people 🙂
Do you mean you wrote letters to purposely burn them?
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Yes, for my eyes and with counsellor as part of therapy one time. It really helped. I once blogged about this in the early months of my blog.
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Interesting. Could you share the link to that post?
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Yes, I can share my experience for it. My post does come with a trigger warning though at the beginning of the post, as so to know what to expect. This is part 2 I share, where I talked about how counsellor suggested I write a letter.
Link to part 1 in that post if you want to read the first one.
https://mywellbeingandlearningjourney.wordpress.com/2016/02/13/my-counselling-sessions-part-2-of-2/
I hope it helps you some way by reading this, as well as when you do your own letter writing for your own eyes, or to share with counsellor.
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Hey, I read both of the posts. I can’t say how, but yeah, your posts helped me. I have some questions:
I see that you burned the letter not immediately after writing it. Are you supposed to keep it for some time? Or can you burn it immediately after that?
How does reading the letter before burning help?
What are ground techniques?
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For how long you keep it is down to you. Its when you feel ready. For me, I had a lot of hurt and pain which caused trauma and so the conversations I had with my counsellor over the letter went on in a few sessions.
When it came to me burning the letters was when I was ready to let go, after acknowledging all that happened. I had this buried for a long time and I had PTSD from it, so something I had to do slowly for me.
You will know when the time is right to burn your letter, or to bury it. How and when is only something you can answer in your own time.
My ground techniques to help me were using senses. So taste, seeing, smell, hearing (well not much hearing for me with having a hearing loss, so other senses are used more.)
For when I travelled to counselling, based on the time I had an unexpected moment where I dissociated, I made sure I had lavender on a tissue to smell, or a crystal in my pocket to touch.
Water on the go to sip was another.
When at home, mug of tea would help me or fleecy blanket, while observing things in my home, like my feet on the carpet, my fake yellow flowers that were a cheerful colour for me.
Your ground techniques may be different to mine. It’s about finding what works for you.
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Thankyou so much Liz! I’ve done some of these things in the past without realising what they actually meant.
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You’re welcome.
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♥🌼
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