Writing is Therapy

I decided about a year ago that I wanted to write a book. This decision probably seems rash coming from a Dance major with a minor in nutrition, but hear me out. I used to write relentlessly, that was my passion aside from dance and so I would write ruthlessly, ending up with awards for my writing and having a published poem before I graduated high school. I often found that it was a source of catharsis, a way to cope with changing times and confusing situations. I generally feel extremely awkward when talking to someone face to face, having trouble making key points in a conversation through my constantly cracking voice. Thus, writing has always seemed to make more sense to me; I can reason my way through things when I write. It always seems to help me heal.

So, about a year ago, I went through one of the hardest things in my life. You see, my best friend for almost 4 years, one of the three or four men that I trust, the one person I confided in with all of my innermost thoughts, ghosted me. I came home early to surprise him, we had an amazing time catching up and celebrating our lives and advancements, and then things went dark. Communication was discarded like ash from a cigarette. This guy was not just my best friend, I admit. We began as best friends, having an innocent friendship and supporting each other through countless monumental moments and insidious lows, but soon our relationship shifted. It began Last January, when he had admitted that he had feelings towards me. He voiced everything I had been feeling for a sizable amount of time, and we seemed like we were in a good place, not becoming something official but exploring what this newfound set of feelings could mean. He did grand gestures, he was all about the romance for a while. So while I was in a different state, I made a rash decision to come home from college early to surprise him and begin what was supposed to be one of the happiest summers of my young adult life.

So now we fast forward to him ghosting me. Let me be clear, all I asked of him was honesty, and later boundaries. I told him that I was totally happy with just being friends until he was ready for something more, but I needed boundaries. I guess that wasn’t what he wanted. Thus, the day before we had planned to take a road trip, I was dumbfounded when he wouldn’t respond to my texts.

I then went through all these stages of grief, feeling angry and hurt, racking my brain for what I could’ve done to make him hate me all of a sudden. I never verbalized all the ideas floating around in my head, or the pervasive guilt and sadness I felt, thinking that this whole situation was my fault. The only thing I could really do to make sense of it was write. I decided then that I would write a book as a form of healing from this and moving on, laying this enormously confusing situation to rest. I wrote down the history of the tenure of our relationship, beginning when we first met, continuing to our deep connection and then outlining the switch from friendship to infatuation. I would go into manic writing moods where I would crank out maybe three thousand words at a time, then go a month without even looking at the manuscript. I made sure to organize the chapters, so even if I didn’t know what all would go into each chapter, I knew the outline of what stage I was going to delve into. It brought a sense of peace to this storm in my head and allowed me to get everything out without having to stumble through a verbal discourse where I would just repeat the same few phrases in different ways without efficiently expressing myself.

That brings us to now, a year after I started this journey. I can confidently say that I have one chapter left, a year long healing process. This “book” has allowed me to both reconnect with my passion for writing as well as allow myself to get over this loss and look at it objectively. It made me realize that so many things are out of our control, that we can do everything “right,” according to societal norms and put everything out there, be completely authentic, and sometimes even with that, things will not turn out how we think they should. But finding a source of solace, some form of relief in this chaos and amidst uncertainty, we can rise above situations that may be less that ideal. That relief for me is writing, it allows me to make sense of everything, and writing that book, was the best year long journey that I could’ve done.