Nightswimming through Therapy

Two things happened  this week; one looking back, one looking forward. I watched a documentary on Michael Stipes and I discovered Therapeutic Writing. If you have never listened to REM or if you were a huge fan but have neglected your dotage, stop reading for a moment and put 'Nightswimming' on Spotify. Seriously, it's like floating face and palm upwards in a lake of pillows with the soul of your fourteen year old self navigating.

Stipes' advice to anyone involved in writing or creating anything was, 'Don't listen to anybody'. Once you get past the irony of him actually giving that as advice, you realise where his lyrics come from. They fall, unfiltered, from the clearest part of his experience of feeling. They seem to make no sense yet they perfectly described feelings I didn't realise I was having until he sang about them.

Whoever you are, no matter how wealthy, bitter, frightened, intelligent or self assured, you will have a heard a lyric or read a sentence once that stopped you in your tracks. Someone else, an entirely other human being, will have achieved the beautiful experience of putting their feelings into words. You encountered them and suddenly felt a little more known. I am so darn thankful to Mr. Stipes for not normalising his head; for allowing the words to somersault out as they did. C S Lewis always maintained, 'We read to know we're not alone'. Some of us read, some of us listen.

The documentary didn't say much about why Michael Stipes wrote. I don't know anything about his mental health or his personal life but I am willing to bet both were made more enjoyable because he wrote. There is something 'other' about the process of writing. Similar to listening to Stipes' lyrics, I discover what I feel once I've written it down. Until then, it is roaming my mind unidentified and sinister. My mental health and personal life would be in a much sorrier state without the therapy of writing.

This week I discovered this was actually a 'thing'. There is an Institute in America not to mention an entire body of psychologists devoted to the power of creative writing for therapeutic purposes. One task that caught my eye repeatedly through my reading was the simple exercise of writing a letter to someone who has wronged you in the past. You don't need to send it, you just need to allow yourself to say all the things you have been keeping fenced in. There is now 'scientific proof' (more on this as I research it!) to show that people are able to move forward emotionally once an exercise like this is completed. So simple and not rocket science but, sadly, this is the sort of thing we all know about but don't devote the time to actually doing. I am going to try it this week and I urge you to do the same - I really hope you feel a little lighter afterwards.

In the meantime, get back on Spotify and give yourself ten minutes to revisit a long-lost but long-loved lyric that gave your experience of this crazy life a name.

Room to stand still

When I was younger, I collected images of people I wanted to be - in scenes I wanted to live in - and stuck them to my bedroom wall. The most memorable was an older teenage girl on a train platform in a French beret, with a sweet little wooden-trim suitcase and a carefree scarf. I pinned her to my wall and longed to be her; a few months later I made it happen. Sitting on the train heading to North London to stay with my aunt, I lay my beret on the suitcase at my feet and realised I didn't want that girl's outfit. I wanted her freedom.

It didn't matter that I had wasted months saving my Saturday job money and scouring Brighton's charity shops to perfect the look. That was a crucial part of the process. Sitting on that train by myself, I couldn't stop smiling because another piece of my jigsaw had arrived - I realised I craved independence and the romance of train journeys. Something in that image had drawn me in and taken over my thinking for months until I stepped right into it and woke another part of me up. In those young years, there were no worries about what I should be doing - I just remember doing a lot of following my heart and answering to noone about it. I was busy getting to know myself.

Somewhere between then and now, I lost that confidence. My twenties seemed to involve an awful lot of people telling me who I should be, what I should think and I lost that growing clear vision of who I wanted to be. At the time, it felt like growing up of course. You don't have time to spend months recreating a photograph from a magazine for crying out loud, you have to earn some money, find a flat, have some relationships, paint the town red. Maybe seeing so many others doing life in such different ways to me made me question myself and trust them. An incredible amount of inhibitions crept in and set up camp in my head to the point that I willingly lost my young self in order to fit in.

This, without doubt, is not just my story. There are versions of this lament in many journals out there - I lost my way! I can't remember who I'm meant to be! I always feel I should be doing something else! So I have a small theory of how to navigate our way back to the freedom and possibility of living as our younger selves. We need a room to call our own. Think about it, when we were children and students, we had a whole room (or sometimes half a shared room..) that was all ours. We picked the floor, the walls, the bedspread, the lamp. More importantly, we picked the pictures on the wall and where we put them, we picked the music on the stereo, we picked the layout and changed it whenever we changed. When anyone walked into that room, people got to know us. When we walked into that room, we stood still, we became ourselves and we spread that around us like extensions of our inner world.

I am not suggested for a minute that we should all build an extra room onto the back of our houses in order to refocus our thoughts. What I am saying is that we need to recapture the spirit of our own room. Whether it is a corner of a wall in the study, a shelf in the bedroom, a cupboard in the dining room or even a book big enough to stick all our bits in; we need a space to collect what inspires us. An image, a quote, a thought, the melody of a song, a small piece of our own art or writing. It is not there for display purposes, it is there to remind us what we like, who we want to be able to say we were when we're old. It is not necessarily to be shared, it is a chance to forget trends and expectations and to be honest. Obviously there are on-line versions of this very process, Pinterest being the most popular. I think these are fabulous and definitely have their place. However, you are still moving around images chosen by other people and the pressure to 'follow' others creeps in again.

I once knew a very creative couple who were lucky enough to live in a two bedroom flat in South London. While they always slept in the same room, they each had a bedroom to themselves. It was an experiment they were trying to see what would come out of them as individuals and as a couple if they maintained their separate and joint identities. For the two years they lived there, each of them grew beyond recognition in their confidence and risk taking, not to mention creativity in their jobs and hobbies. Their rooms were amazing. This month, in amongst the unceasing tide of life, I have been trying to stop and refocus myself to my own channel. I have taken a few more romantic train journeys, I have cut out a few more images and given myself room to stand still.