I’ve been journaling for a couple of years now.

Doing it has become a vital part of getting to know the deepest parts of my psyche.

It’s a truly simple yet amazingly powerful habit.

I did it rigorously and extensively when I quit drinking, over 10 years ago, and I picked it up again in the Summer of 2021 when I decided that I wanted my life to change, and realized I had to start doing the work.

Most of my journaling has been in the form of loosely documenting my life and the many insights around changes, obstacles, confusion, and deepest questions.

A lot of it is fairly pleasant and light-hearted.

Sharing my inner life with myself (which sounds kinda weird but it’s actually exactly what happens) has provided me with a deeper sense of my emotional cycles, my personal pitfalls, and the many dramatic themes around love and abandonment and self-worth and power that play out again and again.

My goal (to which I’m extremely committed) is to excavate and experience and feel through those deepest beliefs and assumptions, to shine a bright light on all the stuff that keeps holding me back, that takes away the joy, and that’s supposed to let me give up before I even start, and then fucking smother it with love.

There’s a lot of dark shit.

It’s really, REALLY astonishing to experience the sheer depth of my negativity, like a powerful undercurrent of dread.

I knew there was a lot of that (because my life reflected it), but becoming truly aware of the constant cynicism and sense of disappointment that accompanies me everywhere I go, is just devastatingly sad.

Realizing that this has ruled my life, that this has completely dictated almost everything I did and believed, is massive.

There’s often this sense of ‘why bother?’, and it affects almost everything.

Or at least it used to do that.

Because it’s getting better and lighter, every single day.

Journaling with a truly open mind, using a pace that overrides most of the intellectual tendency to hold back or do it right, will open up stuff that has been deeply hidden for a long time.

I’d rather call this ‘free writing’ because it’s more intuitive and sloppier, simply because there’s hardly any structure or format.

It’s like purging on paper.

Free writing (which can be frustratingly challenging in the beginning) has shown me that at my core there’s a really profound urge to fuck everything up, to create and recreate disappointment after disappointment, and it is truly staggering.

The tendency for this kind of destructive, soul-sucking negativity, is incredibly tenacious, it hardly ever gets tired, it never really gives up, and it comes in all sizes from all directions, all the time, from really subtle to really over the top.

To me, it’s totally obvious that I’ve opened the floodgates.

There’s no turning back and I don’t even want that, not anymore.

This is the time, the ONLY time, and it has to be done.

And I’m crushing it, literally.

Our lives are mostly lived under the governance of hidden limitations, an intricate system of objections and judgments, and assumptions and opinions that are simply there to seemingly keep us safe, but only keep us small and powerless.

We can’t ever surpass or overcome that deeply ingrained and well-trained mechanism within us if we don’t recognize it, and boldly face it.

It’s an unconscious, messy, really intelligent phenomenon that has to be brought to the surface to kill it.

Otherwise, it will just kill us, it will kill our joy, our passion, our boldness, our zest for life, our creativity, our uniqueness, our compassion for ourselves and others, and our willingness to go beyond the normal, the accepted, the comfortable.

What really struck me today, as I was contemplating all the things that came up during my free writing morning session, is how invasive this tendency to be negative actually is.

Almost everything that felt exciting at first was immediately and automatically attacked and ridiculed and toxified by a sense of ‘but why would I even care?’.

That constant messing with my enthusiasm is more like a sensation, not a story, not a couple of words or a negative thought.

It almost feels like a threat, like a menacing drone.

And it always intends on creating a life full of restrictions.

It’s like being pulled back, the moment I start to rise.

A feeling I’ve always known, a feeling I took for granted, and a feeling I used to shamefully obey.

It’s sad, it’s so very sad because I realized that this has accompanied me most of my life without knowing I could stop it and change it, and it has sucked away so many options, ideas, and opportunities.

But what is way more important, is that I feel powerful enough to face it.

This shit can’t be glossed over, it can’t be dealt with by sweet affirmations and proud promises.

It’s too deep, too powerful, too cleverly hidden, and way too influential behind the scenes, and it will only disappear if you consciously destroy it.

So that’s what I’m doing: I’m digging it up and I’m destroying it.

With love.

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(Do you feel restricted in life? Are you doing the same things over and over again? Do you sometimes dream about a bolder life, where you are the creator instead of the humble recipient? Would you like to grab life by the balls instead of waiting for the magic to happen? And do you have no fucking idea where to start? Good. Really good. Because now you do –> mail me!)

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(Photo by @dragos126, for Unsplash)