Tag: writing

HOW TO FEEL OK ABOUT NOT BEING OK

during senior moments

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when I wake up and before I sleep, when the feeling of not being ok is most sharp.

From books to TV dramas, this topic of acknowledging your feeling of not feeling ok is becoming a cliché. The premise for this adage is that most of us are not honest about our feelings. As we move within our professional circles or communities, we tend to camouflage our feelings especially when we are supposed to lead the way, in mentoring persons or groups. Before friends, we tend to pretend in order to blend. We hide our true selves before our loved ones to avoid adding to their burdens. Acknowledging the feeling of not being ok is easier said than done. For if we can’t acknowledge it before others, then we have not acknowledged it at all.

talk to someone

Most TV dramas I’ve watched involve close friendships and buddy relationships. The teleplay will always craft a loyal, unassuming friend who listens and responds compassionately. This buddy and companion always gives their friends priority attention in times of need. It takes a long time to develop this kind of relationship. When a fall out happens, the misunderstanding leads to ghosting or erasure. All light and heavy conversations about anything with friends will cease. Lost is the privilege of talking to someone without fear of judgment. Gone is that lightness of being resulting from sharing. Then it will take a long time to find a new confidante.   

engage in self care

My niece told her mother about her boredom with house chores. She had to give up her work in advertising when she had a miscarriage. After that, even working from home presented too much risk. So she stopped working altogether. Eventually, she got depressed. My sister advised her to go window shopping. When she was a young single mother, she used to take her children to the mall, whenever she felt tired and lonely. Her daughter remembered those times in the mall. In those times of useless malling her Mom fitted shoes and clothes without buying, pleasing herself with a momentary new look now and then. My niece obeyed her mother’s advice and went window shopping. She came back home with an upbeat energy, having momentarily escaped that feeling of not being ok.

meditation in poetry

The poet Christian Wiman wrote, “Poetry arises out of absence, a deep internal sense of wrongness out of a mind that feels itself to be in some way cracked.” My ‘meditation’ happens on paper because writing is therapeutic. Poetry in particular is a way of thinking meditatively. In writing poetry, I pause at every line. I struggle with every word and phrase. The meaning of the poem becomes clear to me only when the poem has finally become a poem. Writing a poem is multiple rewriting of structured notes, similar to the endless revision of our lives as we discover some new ways of being. The very first poem I wrote is entitled

journal entry
©1987

Once I tried to weave a verse

for pages back I weaved

but couldn’t stitch more lines than one

and so I went to sleep

and dreamt of verses that are echoes

of life’s embittered cries

and words escaping from the ghettoes

of unfulfilled desires

verses sounding and resounding

rhythmic flowing replies

to question marks abounding

in sleep their wise disguise.

exercise

How not ok I feel could be expressed through aimless walking. Walking without a destination turns negative energy into exhaustion. This exercise cause my pale skin to turn red. I lose the zombie look and gets a halo.

creative expression

One thing that I had always done, collecting art materials and storing them in my old leather bag. I have always wanted to paint. However, I have not painted at all. Not ok with not having done a sketch of even one decent picture, I do an inventory of my paint colors and brushes now and then, to keep hoping. My last sketch was of my Mother when she was still with me. I can’t find this sketch immediately but its the widget at the bottom of Page a Writer that links to this Y.A. blog.

set small goals

I’ve always gotten ahead of myself, or counted chicks before the eggs have hatched. My mouth outpace my vision and I end up projecting but not delivering. But dreaming is a way of coping. When I am not ok, I review the dreams in my journals, highlighting what has been achieved however teeny-weeny.

keep the space clean

I am not ok with noise and a messy home.  I can feel clutter even if I don’t see it because my house is small. Every bag and basket in my home is for storage of basic and mundane things. When I am not ok, I destress by organizing those ‘bagged’ objects, ensuring that every thing I’m keeping away deserves the space. This relaxes me.

listen to music

I find walking with earphones, and listening to music while doing something else, tedious and stressful. Restaurants play background music too loudly-not at all music to my ears. Neighborhood karaoke singing assaults my ear drums. How do I cope in the midst of noise and mess? I leave that space for one that is quiet and orderly, where music adds to the ambiance. But almost always, this space is expensive.

maintain a routine

There is the routine bad habits and the routine that is productive. Routine bad habits include drinking expensive coffee every morning,  eating halo-halo or puto bumbong for dessert, risking a sugar spike, and binge watching on Netflix until very late in the evening. The routine that is productive involves the exact opposite of those three. But when not ok, meryenda and watching K-drama on Netflix is my default-not- ok normal.

seek professional help

My doctors are the following: An endocrinologist, a cardiologist, an EENT specialist, an ob-gynecologist, a breast cancer surgeon, a throat specialist, and an ophthalmologist. Aware of my mortality, I am ok only as far as ok can get. Indeed, my health card is proof of this.

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WHAT YOU NEED TO START WRITING – WORDHOUSE WISHTICKLES

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If you are like most writers, your first hurdle is how to start writing. You may have cultivated the habit of journaling or writing in your diary, yet when it is time to write that book you have been dreaming about, you end up staring at the screen, or in a dramatic showcase of frustrated writing, your trash-can overflows with crumpled paper. But when does writing commence? Writing begins when you sit down and write.

IN BRAINSTORMING YOUR SUBJECT

As soon as you begin encoding letters, words, and phrases, you are already writing. Rarely will the codes you type be considered final sentences and expressions of your ideas. But whatever they are that you have initially penned, those are your starts. Those ‘brainstorms,’ are sparks of creative insights that may or may not find their place at all in the final document.

A common misconception about brainstorming is that it is a random formulation of subjects from a clash of many heads. But writing is the job of one single person at one set continuous time. The brainstorming is done by only one creative head who will inevitably talk to itself alone throughout the writing process. This means that the author-originator must be deliberate with a free and unencumbered brainstorming. If in the process they end up with more than three pages of nonsensical and unorganized thought, so be it. Stop crumpling the paper, but save the document with a date, and dating subsequent revisions as well, keep the initial drafts on file.

Brainstorming yield your first thoughts in writing. You may not yet be aware of your subject but are biased towards an opinion or viewpoint. You may not have yet established how you’re going to package your ideas, but are leaning toward a form. You may not be fully informed but eager to research and dig deeper into a topic. Whatever your leaning may be, brainstorming will light them up for you so you will find the way toward a vision for a project.    

IN GATHERING YOUR REFERENCES

Research is a fearsome word. The stereotypical impression is that of a scholar buried under a pile of paper, glasses falling off her face as she reads through pages with furrowed eyebrows. However, as a writer you need to seek out the relevant literature at the very start. You need related texts to capture the free fall of creative imagination. Research will give you a framework. It is a wisdom catcher that will bring your ideas together. Resulting citations will have made you check, suspect, or validate assumptions and presuppositions. You gain authority in the subject matter at hand.

IN JOURNALING YOUR EXPERIENCES

What about the process itself? Writing is a reflexive exercise. Once you sit down and write, you are very much aware of your process. How efficient is your method of writing? How disciplined? How relaxed? How egoistic? How sensitive? Often writing starts here as well, when you become self-aware. Do you take down notes on the go? Do you keep a notebook and change it only after you’ve filled it out entirely? Do you write down dialogues you hear as you commute? Do you keep a notepad of quotations?

Consult your journals, your letters, your diary, and even those back of receipts where you wrote down bullet points of wisdom. What is it that you always wrote about and why? How were you able to write in an unhurried pace or under a tense situation? Can you recall how you came up with one cohesive statement? Are you writing about personal desires using gut expressions? When you start writing, every process is a precious first note of how your text may eventually sing.

IN WRITING A FIRST DRAFT

You have reached a point when all that brainstormed ideas have narrowed into one united thought. Now is when you try to harmonize your concept by thinking about an audience. You need to ask at this stage, who will read what you have written and why? How will that reader not misunderstand? How will this writing resonate with that audience hearer?

Writing the first draft involves a hearer. There is always that ear of attention an author-originator will have to seduce through set, contemplative ways. That ear will hear because what the final draft is saying has aimed for it to listen. Deliberately, writing the final draft is a performance of careful attention to detail. The grammar, syntax and diction forming the major units of thoughts need exactness and fluency. Usually, the draft will, at this final form, exhibit the writing voice, or the style, or the angle, or beat. The final draft has made only one cohesive claim or perspective. Ambiguity is completely gone, and at least for that one target hearer and audience, a point has been made.