Secret Thoughts Are Heavy

I like to journal my thoughts in emails to myself. When I'm particularly disturbed and chit-chatty, I can have a thread a million emails long going back and forth between me and myself all in one evening. I'll be all, "I fucking hate stretchy pants! And I hate everyone who looks at me!" and then I'll reply with, "but I'm amazed at my body for growing a human, and I need to go slather it with coconut oil and remind the wobbly bits that they're appreciated, and loved, and rather quite exciting, if looked at under the right lighting, with squinty eyes, after a glass of red."

When I was a kid, we didn't have email or smart phones and so I had to journal in those stupid little hard diaries with the spines that don't bend, with the locks on the front that only succumbed to a teensie tiny little key that was almost always lost. And I believed that no other little girl could think such wicked things, and so to put them down with pen on paper would be a horrific crime for which I most certainly would get caught and severely punished. 

We all know, however, that there are just some thoughts that we cannot hold inside, that if we did, they'd eventually liquify and seep out in some form or another, quietly like an oil spill or explosively like a volcano. And so I decided, one day, when I was a child, that I could write down all my wicked thoughts onto paper but that my words would be illegible; I could write each letter of each word of each sentence, right on top of one another. Depending on my levels of anger and insanity, I had been known to push a soggy ink blob right through that piece of paper. I'd sit there in church, or school, or at home at the kitchen table, grip my pen in one hand, push the edge of the paper down with the other, and write down all sorts of death and hate, right there, and I'd get it all out. The loathsome enemy could be sitting right beside me and I'd be writing all sorts of evil things about them and they'd never even know.

I think many of us wish Facebook had this status update option, yes? Like, every time I post something that looks like a giant ink blob, all 4 people who click on my timeline will know that I am probably bloated, irrational, and hateful.

We all don't need to put down our dark thoughts into an ink blob. I mean, when we feel like we're ten minutes away from being institutionalized, we can deal with it in our own way. Everyone needs a Safe Friend: a friend who won't judge or laugh or phone the cops when you unload your dark hateful thoughts about life. We can write it, or speak it, or symbolize it into a rock and throw it into a lake. We could walk twenty minutes into the forest, pull our hair and scream out impossibly nasty things into the night air. Or, when it's dark out, we could drive along the freeway and verbally abuse the empty seats next to and behind us.

But whatever we do, however we choose to get it out, once we do we will feel a whole lot lighter. And maybe those stretchy pants won't be needed anymore.