Remember, it's always good to talk, even if it’s scary. Write down what’s in your Head
So I moved to Berlin recently and in all the madness of setting up life over here, the writing took a back seat. No, almost a month later, I’ve had some time to sit and write something.
I wrote something in the uncertain times of moving. I had just moved over to Berlin for my wife’s job and, I don’t know if you’ve been to Berlin before, but it is weird….really cool, but weird… ”alternative”, and I got a huge culture shock. I felt very alienated, wife working, me trying to find my feet in a new city where, despite having been told most people speak English, everything was German, trying to find a job, sorting out registration to live in the country, looking for a flat to live in, all while being hold up in a hotel room. It was scary. And I know how this sounds. “First world problems” and all that, but even though I have the privilege of doing something so amazing in my life and the rare opportunity to explore another country, it was still scary.
Anyway, I wrote this little piece of freefall writing in the first few days here in Berlin and since then things have turned out very positive, but looking back on this piece of writing and what my thoughts were like at the time shows me how quickly things can turn around for the better
“I feel so scared right now. There is something so terrifying about not knowing what you want to do or who you want to be in life
Terrifying
Have to be there for her. Can’t begin to imagine what she’s dealing with. The weight on her shoulders to provide for us both…
Desperate to do something. No one can see into the future…
Gardening. Digging. Using hands. Using head.
Back to uni?
Something I enjoy
Contributing to the planet
Contributing to
Money?
What’s going to be the balance?
Agricultural studies?
Sustainability?
Growing plants…and self
Language to learn
The built landscape passes by on the train
Time passes by.”
So I stopped writing and left it there and I’m only putting it up on this blog now a few weeks later and it’s funny how I chose to finish it… “time passes by”. Time really did pass by, because now my outlook on the move is really positive. This is a form of Freefall Writing. I wrote the first thing that came into my head, and it really showed where my head was at at the time.
Freefall writing is something I learned a few years ago and I would recommend it to anyone. My first experience with Freefall writing starts with a story. Let me set the scene:
2016, I enrolled in a Post Graduate degree in Environmental & Sustainability Education at Edinburgh University. This was around the time my anxiety had already peaked and I was starting to learn more about it, and more about myself. On the first module of this degree, I was going to spend a week in a house in the north of Scotland, earning, cooking, socialising, and experiencing the great outdoors with my peers. It was a monumental step forward for me to spend a week in a house full of strangers. I refused the offer of a lift from Edinburgh University up to Kingussie, just south of Inverness, and drove up myself, uncertain and unsure of what lay ahead. I parked up, walked to the front door and could hear people talking inside. I remember thinking “are they talking about me? I’m late. If I walk in I’ll be the centre of attention. How many people are inside? Too many”, and I panicked. “Hit a freak-oot” as they say. I briskly walked back to my car, got in and was about to drive all the way back to Glasgow. If I had done that, it would have been a waste of my time and energy and a waste of a full tank of fuel, so I had a word with myself. “You can go home any time you want. Go in there, go to the course leader, tell him your name and tell him that you are feeling really unwell and you need to go home. Get in the car, drive home, curl up into a ball in your bed and have a good cry at why your life is so shit right now”. So that was my PAO. I walked straight into the house feeling an overwhelming sense of adrenaline coursing through me, expecting it to be like the scene out of American Werewolf in London when everything stops and its silent and everyone is staring at you and you look completely out of place…but not one person even looked up as they all seemed enthralled in their own conversations with each other. I spotted the course leader and without hesitating I introduced myself and he said I was the last one and to find somewhere to sit and a discussion will begin about what to expect over the week. I spotted a nice spot in the very large living room, near the window, close to some people but still secluded enough. I sat down, got my notepad and pen out and as the course leader started talking, I felt something. A very unusual, yet oddly satisfying feeling. Within the first minute, I was having thoughts like “was I having a panic attack a few minutes ago?” and “this is going to be the best week ever”. Literally a few minutes, going from “I need to leave. I’m freaking out” to “can’t wait for the next few days, learning, socialising and getting outside in nature”. Having the escape plan already in my head gave me comfort. Enough comfort to go through with the situation. And what happened? I had one of the best weeks of my life!
One of our first lectures was about Freefall Writing. In her book “The art of Freefall” (2013), Barbara Turner-Vesselago talks about the creative writing method known as “Freefall Writing”.
The 4 main things I was taught about this type of writing are as follows:
1. Write what comes to you: Begin to write, without any particular plan in mind of what you are about to say. Whatever occurs to you once you have started writing, write it down.
2. Don’t change anything: whatever you’ve written leave it on the page. Don’t change it. simple? It is simple. But this is the precept most writers seem to find hardest to follow.
3. Give all the sensuous detail: whatever world you find yourself in, don’t forget to say how things feel, look, taste and smell there & what can be heard. Give specific sensuous detail.
4. Go where the energy is for you: Go forward. If several things come up at once for you to write about, choose one that strikes you the most forcefully, whether you’re attracted or repelled. If you’re still not sure, choose the one you’re most afraid to write about. Go forward.
With these four things in mind, we went outside, walked a few minutes and found ourselves in this clearing, underneath really tall trees. It was open yet dull under the tree. In the middle there stood a very strangely shaped oak tree. Our course leader said to find a place to sit, take out our notebooks stay silent for about a minute and take it all in, then once the minute was up, start writing. This was my first experience of Freefall writing and this is what I wrote:
All together as one entity
Poems spring to mind, no rhymes
No time for thinking
A ladybug appears on my journal
Eyes remain focused
What is it thinking about
White diamonds
White hearts
Red back
Confused about where to go
The oak tree generations old
What has it seen?
What have I seen?
Why am I here?
To learn?
To question?
To understand
It is on my hand, tickly.
Woah
It is scared.
It jumped
Come back
It’s on my journal again.
The smell of cool autumn pine forest air
Peaceful, quiet, tranquil
Writing without thought
Its wings spread
It is gone
Still the oak tree stays
It has no wings
No escape
Where it was planted is where it will die
It is withering slowly.
Isolated among an army of minions
No sense of panic or worry now
Not much anyway
The silence of people being in their own world makes me disappear into mine
And I sink
I sink back into the ground
I am comfortable
I am secluded from everyone
Everyone else is focusing on their own world
Why are we doing this?
I like the peace, the sense of comfort
Lauren. I’m so glad she is in my life.
Can she understand how amazing she is?
I feel I would not be here without her.
Yet I am here without her.
A sense of missing yet happy.
Anxiety is a thing of the past.
This is what I want to do
Be at one with nature and my own thoughts
The forest is getting duller
My thoughts brighten
No sign of that ladybug
I don’t normally gloat about these types of things, but I think it sounds not half bad. A bit dark or intense at times maybe but interesting to re-read it again years later and transport myself back to a time when my experience of mental health was fairly minimal.
I would recommend doing this form of writing as a kind of mindfulness exercise. Go somewhere that is relatively secluded, be on your own, with your own thoughts and just write. The first thing that comes to your mind. Spend a few minutes getting your thoughts on paper. If you want to rip it up after, fine. If you want to keep it and look at it a week, a month, years later, fine. It may or may not come to any kind of great benefit, but it does no harm. I’ve been saying this to people for years, but I fully believe that you get out what you put in. If you really want to help yourself and your mind and grow, you need to put in the hours. It takes time, but time is something everyone has. If its 15 minutes once a week that you have to yourself, sit down and write. Freefall, and someone will be there to catch you…and that person, is you.