I’ve talked about it with my therapist at length1. We talk about my need to hide behind words as a way of reducing my vulnerability. They become armor, when taken in this sense.
There’s a tension, then, between these two explanations: to put it the way I did at the beginning is to allow words to be a useful tool to define the edges of my emotions and perhaps make them easier to digest and understand in the process.
To hear Jeremy’s suggestion, though, my words are a means by which I might reduce my responsibility to actually feel the emotions I try to define.
-Thus me, sitting here on my lunch break, writing journal entries on my phone.
+Thus me, sitting here on my lunch break, writing journal entries on the steno pad I use in sessions.
Despite the utility I know there to be within the act of journaling, something which I’ve recommended to countless patients of mine, it’s never quite something that I’ve picked up for myself. I always felt like maybe I was supposed to do something more than just write about what I had done during the day, so I’d go off onto long philosophical tangents like this, and then I’d start to feel guilty for not writing about what I’d done during the day. No matter what, it felt like I was doing something wrong, like I was incorrectly doing the thing I knew how to describe to those who looked to me for instruction.
When I’d brought this fact up to Jeremy, he laughed and called me a “fucking nerd” and then talked me through what we thought my goals should be: