Out of My Head and Onto Paper

I’m in my head a lot.

I overthink most things. Sometimes that includes big, important life decisions, and other times, it’s what I want to eat for dinner that night.

I also overthink the words I use daily.

I love the feeling of stringing together the perfect sentence. I’ll change the positioning of a word once it is on paper ten times in ten different ways to see where it fits the best. That’s what makes writing feel so empowering. You can edit yourself. You can arrange your thoughts in a way that is nearly impossible to do when speaking. There is both beauty and deception in that.

But making sense of the words running through my head and getting them out onto paper sometimes is tough. Making sense of my jumbled existence in a way that forms a story or some cathartic version of self expression is difficult.

And is the self expression inherent to the writing or am I shoehorning it in? That, I overthink, too.

Writing is so often equated to being therapeutic and it is, but I often consider how much of myself I’m supposed to give to it. When I sit at my desk there’s always a little voice that says “all of me” and then that same little voice a few minutes later says “except this and that.”

Why in the privacy of my own notebook am I sometimes both scared and invigorated to be myself?

Lately I’ve been having trouble being vulnerable in my writing and in my storytelling in a way that I haven’t been in real life. While the competing sentiments in my head aren’t sure how much of myself to give over to any particular project, I’m almost positive that some vulnerability is essential to writing anything.

If I didn’t find the beauty, the humor, the sadness in life’s eccentricities and mull over them for a period of time, then I’d have nothing to write about. Life fuels the writing and there is no writing without life.

On some level though, this fear confirms to me that I’m living a life worth figuring out on paper. We all have this, but sometimes self doubt manifests itself in the form of fear, and that fear is the kick I need.

In a way, being in my head helps with it all, too. It can help to shape stories. It allows me to deeply consider things both as they are and as they could be.

At the end of the day, it feels better to get out of my head and onto paper, even when it’s a jumbled mess. It’s worth it, even when it makes sense only to me, at least in those first few minutes of a session. Even when I’m writing a scene that makes me cry my eyes out, or a joke that makes me laugh until I cry (I’m not that funny). Even when I feel like showing it to no one, or when I feel like showing it to everyone. I feel incredibly lucky to have it. I realize that the world inside my head isn’t so bad, but sometimes, it feels better when put onto paper.