Finding Sustainable Happiness Through Writing
I used to hate my brain. I hated the way it works. My brain goes a million miles an hour and this used to scare me, and because of this, I have never enjoyed writing. It has honestly always been such a hassle to put my thoughts into words. I have plenty of words in my head, but it is the most difficult thing in the world for me to pinpoint just one idea and focus on it. I would always express myself through different creative mediums; the main one being dance. When I was told I needed to get foot surgery and wouldn’t be able to walk for months I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was terrified of how I would deal with the hardships that come with recovery on top of my normal everyday struggles. I had no idea that writing would have become my safe haven.
Recovery was much more difficult than I thought it would be. The weeks leading up to surgery were filled with anxiety. Breakdowns every night caused by the stress and nervousness of “how am I going to let out my emotions?”. Dance was the only thing that kept me sane during quarantine, and recovery was essentially just quarantine all over again, but take away the one thing that got me out of bed on some of my hardest days. Needless to say, I was petrified. It was important for me to plan and ensure that I kept myself healthy mentally along with physically. I used WP2 to explore the idea of using writing as a tool for preparation. With this project, I created my own recipe for happiness by matching a lemonade recipe with my own life equivalents. When facing difficult situations people usually say, “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”. I took this age-old metaphor and found parallels in my life that correlated with the ingredients used to make lemonade. I identified the lemons in my life as the other things I would focus on to distract me from the fact that I could not dance. I also found correlations between my faith/hope being much like water used as the foundation in lemonade and my friends and family being the things that made life sweeter and transformed the bitter parts of recovery. Putting a visual list together of the things I would do to take care of myself during the recovery process eased my mind before surgery and helped cope with all the upcoming challenges I was about to face. Everyone had said the worst part about having surgery was the anticipation before it happened, however I was naïve to think that this meant there wouldn’t be any more struggles in the future.
I thought that the hardest part was done because that is what everyone had told me, but I knew in my heart that it wasn’t over. I knew that this was only the beginning of the uphill climb. Honestly, there really wasn’t ever a point in time where everything got easier. There were just different obstacles to face each day. Yes, eventually one struggle may have subsided, but there was always a new one that followed. It was kind of like the saying “when one door closes another one opens”, although it appeared that every door had strings attached. I learned that no matter how much you plan everything out, life always has a way of sneaking up on you and turning your whole world upside down. It is impossible to consider every possible variable because there are simply too many things out of one’s control. The one thing I failed understand was that just because I created this perfect recipe for success, did not mean the lemonade could still end up being sour. There was no way for me to come up with the ideal ratio of all the ingredients and without just the right amount of support, distractions, and faith, I was still left with a bitter taste; correlating to a rough recovery.
There was no way I could have known that my best friend would abandon me when things got hard. There was no way I could have anticipated how physically and emotionally taxing this whole experience would be. Surgery not only takes a toll on the body, but without the support from my friends in addition to the physical limitations of not being able to leave my room for three weeks, it also took a toll on my mental health. If a drastic life change like this took place previously, I would simply drive to the dance studio early and dance until my body hurt so much, I could no longer feel my heart aching. This was the first time I couldn’t just hop in the car; I couldn’t even stand on my own two feet. Instead, I started writing everything down.
I kept a journal throughout the entire process of my recovery. Every time I was going through a rough patch and felt uncomfortable talking to any of my friends about it since they were not acting like the support system I had once envisioned; I wrote it down. I wrote down every feeling either in words or song. Writing soon became therapeutic and over time this turned into my instinctual coping mechanism. Although I am not good at putting my emotions into words because I always have too many thoughts and I can never figure out where to start, I was able to take every writing opportunity in Writing 150 to identify how I was feeling. Every prompted writing session, I ended up subconsciously connecting every piece of work directly to my recovery. Writing my thoughts and feelings down is now a new way for me to cope with everything in my life and this would never have happened if I had never temporarily lost my ability to dance.
As I mentioned in my WP3 writing project Dancers Living with Debilitating Training, “The best coping mechanisms are the ones that not only help get you through the hard times; they are also the things that make you evolve and create a sustainable happiness that manifests from the inside out” (1). Having only one way to cope is not a sustainable way to ensure happiness. It is important to have multiple ways of dealing with emotions because if it is ever taken from you, you can get lost. I was lost, but through writing I found my happiness again.
Work Cited
Way, Riley. “Dancers Living with Debilitating Training.” Medium, Writing 150 Spring 2021, 16 Apr. 2021, medium.com/writing-150-spring-2021/dancers-living-with-debilitating-training-680555633782.
