How journaling can help us cope with the pandemic
As a teaching artist and poet on the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts’ roster, I’ve worked with elementary, middle, high school and college students, women emerging from prison and elders in nursing homes. While my visits to classrooms and facilities centered on writing essays or poetry, the subtext was sharing the possibility of writing as a way to strengthen a personal sense of identity.
I first discovered that writing could be helpful and healing while serving as a U.S. Air Force historian during the war in Southeast Asia. One night, as I sat in my office at a military base in Thailand, instead of collating reports on bombs dropped on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, or about the secret CIA-sponsored war in Laos, I wrote a poem.
Those words on paper were a fragile step toward stages of creativity that sustained me through the despair I felt after the war and beyond.
In this challenging and frightening time, it occurred to me that I could share how I personally use journaling as a foundation for creative writing but also to deal with fear, sadness, anger and more, in order to cultivate strength and even wonder.
My tools are simple: an inexpensive, lined notebook (with pages that can be removed easily) a pen that is easy to hold and write with, and 10 to 20 minutes each day.
If I begin journaling with a complaint or grievance, my goal is to empty that feeling onto the page to free my mind and emotions. I don’t analyze. I simply allow whatever words come to mind find their way onto the paper.
It’s not the kind of meditation where thinking is avoided. In this meditative freewriting, thoughts are written, other thoughts rising from those thoughts are written, etc. There is no emphasis on spelling, punctuation or handwriting. It’s one word, one phrase at a time, with no self-judgement.
I find that doing this most days feels
freeing. The result over weeks and months can be more clarity concerning the past and the present, while paving a way for the future.
This foundation for creativity and life itself that I have been in the process of building through journaling has helped with despair, with grief, with rebuilding myself internally after one of my sons died 17 years ago. My
heart goes out to those who are struggling with grief just now.
More than 210,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. alone have left fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, grandchildren, friends in shock and mourning. We have all been harmed by the virus.
Going forward, we will need new ideas and new energy to deal with this harm. First, though, a companion need for healing and creative thinking will continue for a long time in order to repair ourselves and our country. I am suggesting that journaling can help us navigate reality, the continuing danger from the virus, and carelessness of others.
We need to take care of ourselves first. And reach a point where we can think ahead to supporting legislation to protect the rights of all who live in the U.S., to work with climate change, establish inclusive general and reproductive health care, education that works in cities and suburbs, support for parents, income inequality, poverty, mental health and more.
If we feel strong enough, we can choose an issue that affects us and begin to open ourselves to meditating toward solutions to propose to our legislators. In developing creative actions for ourselves and possibly our country, we may feel more prepared for the work ahead.
There are, of course, ways other than journaling to place a creative foundation beneath our feet now and in the future; for instance: dancing, cooking, crocheting, knitting, singing, drawing, painting, woodworking. All of these can be done and shared on Zoom or FaceTime with friends and family members. Or at a socially distanced gathering outside while the weather is accommodating.
We need to stay safe. All of us are needed in order to strengthen our communities, our country and our world.
Marilyn Shoemaker Hazelton of Salisbury Township is on the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts’ roster as a teaching artist, a recipient of the 2006 Arts Ovation Award for Literary Arts from Allentown Arts Commission and a published poet and essayist.