Between the lines of therapy and research

I feel buried in a dark hole, six feet deep under the ground. All I feel is anger and rage that if unleashed can destroy the whole world. I lie in my grave with the cotton quilt covering my whole body and my entire face. I’m simply trying not to exist at least temporarily. Life’s fast pace destroys my ability to live. Therefore, I exist as a physical corpse walking on the ground, living day by day, and waiting for that moment when I lie in my grave again. Interacting with people, objects and life in general suffocates me because it brings to the surface all the rage I feel that has accumulated over the years. An argument or a disappointing expectation is enough to trigger the anger back out so I choose to escape. I escape from the overwhelming pressure of life. I escape from the terrifying mistakes the people around me do. I escape from the inability to express my discomfort. I escape by sleeping and when I sleep I write.

It starts with static and the sound of the clock ticking. I feel extremely handicapped during that moment because it is all I can hear for a good amount of time along with the blindness I experience with darkness I see when I cover my face. I feel paralyzed mentally, physically, psychologically and socially. The pain that comes along with the static is dreadful that it breaks the silence with an overload of thoughts all rushing at once. I lose control over my anger and I unleash all the repressed emotions that have accumulated over the years. My thoughts usually start with questioning who I really am and if I deserve what I have whether good or bad and this is when water forms in my eyes. Sadly, with every tear drop, the pain intensifies but here comes the most difficult part in which I start putting these emotions in words, at least in my own head.  Rhymes start to form in my mind and I throw the cotton quilt off me. I jump out of my grave, grabbing my journal and a pen, writing down my thoughts like:

Between the morals that has been built
And being deceived with guilt
I’m not emotionless, I’m rather a flower starting to wilt

Feeling warm in summer and watching the snow melt
And suddenly I freeze up, I don’t know what I felt

Waking up today or waking up tomorrow
It doesn’t matter what day cause I’m always in sorrow

But wait! My thoughts are shattered and I get distracted by the sound of my ankle and knees clicking and cracking as I step out of my grave and onto the ground to grab my journal. That pain of having my thoughts shatter is worse than having to feel the pain of being an arthritis patient. One thought pulls another as I train my sight on my journal, trying so hard to focus on what is it that really hurts? What is it that I really want to write about? In this instance, I become my own therapist. I counsel myself every night in my grave. Since I was a child, I reckon writing down my emotions on sheets on papers, folding them and keeping them in a safe place where no one would ever find, including myself. Every trauma I experience gets erased from my ego once it’s been let out on paper. This is why I always say that a book is a man’s best friend because I write and write and complain and not once has my personal journal not listened to me. Plus, it has never judged me or criticized my thoughts for being irrational or biased.
 

I cannot deny that being a writer has helped me keep my head above the water in almost every situation. However, being a writer doesn’t end at being a therapist. There were many instances where I was asked to write a research paper as an assignment for courses at university. In the latter situation, I wasn’t a therapist but I was rather a researcher but not a cliché one. In other words, I was not just an academic researcher but I was one who was looking for an acceptable way (in the eyes of the society) to express my opinion, in an unbiased, reliable manner. Plus, it is worth noting that my opinions is a huge part of my identity and largely defines who I am. As I mentioned earlier, I am full of repressed emotions that root to suppressed opinions that I was never able to express, simply because I was looked at as being too young or maybe not wise enough to ask people to borrow my vision and see what I see. Therefore, I was looking for a way to convince “the critical thinkers” of what I truly believe and I am not criticizing the critical thinkers here, I am just saying that because of the extreme dishonesty and unreliability that is going on in every segment of life even in academia, those critical thinkers required evidence for every opinion. Hence, it was very important for me to prove my point their way in order to have my opinion accepted from their point of view. The latter not just helped me put my opinions across but also made me feel that I belong with people who accept me and communicate using my language. To sum up, writing has become my only weapon to heal myself as a therapist, a medium to put across my opinion and a way to feel accepted as a reliable researcher.