Writing to Unearth Repressed Emotion

How I worked with poetry as a bridge to my inner world and thoughts on how to start your own writing journey

Like being outside in nature, writing has always been a refuge for me. It’s an open, judgement free space where I can get curious about my inner world and be able to share emotions and experiences that feel hard to navigate through logical processes. This is the beauty of creativity- it allows you to access things from a different perspective and allow through thoughts and ideas that your logical mind might have automatically filtered out. 

When I was in college, I got interested in the intersection of art and climate science and started thinking about art as an access point for deeper changes within individuals and systems. Climate science can be a tricky subject- each person is affected by climate change differently day to day or season by season and everyone has different thoughts and ideas about it. Climate change is also tricky because thinking about true solutions requires thinking about how to unearth our current systems and rework them to make them better. And that is inherently uncomfortable. It means adapting our lives, our habits, our norms to help create that new system. It requires digging down to the root, the foundation of our very systems and existence and asking questions, pulling up deep roots and asking if we really need them or if we can chop them off to make room for new, better ones. 

When we approach climate science communication using art and creativity, each person has an entry point that feels like a welcoming in, an invitation to participate in our own unique way instead of an order to do or be or exist differently in some unclear way. Art allows us to filter climate change and its impacts through our personal lens and be able to share those lenses with others. In this way, art becomes the bridge between our inner worlds and the collective solutions. 

Just like art can be an entry point for tough and uncomfortable scientific truths, writing can be that bridge into the depths of our inner worlds that helps make repressed or uncomfortable truths easier to access and process. For me, this writing bridge came in the form of poetry. Poetry gave me a language to be able to express the depth of each emotion. The poems I wrote became a sort of cipher that helped me decode what my body and emotional world were trying to tell me. 

Poetry was a big reason I was able to recover from my eating disorder. For four years during high school and college I struggled with anorexia, and as I was coming out of the fog and headspace that comes with an eating disorder, I found myself needing an outlet for feelings I knew were affecting me but that were tucked just under the surface. For a few years, poetry was how I was able to communicate with myself and identify my needs and things I needed to process. I feel like I wrote my best stuff during that time because I was working with emotion in its purest form before it made it to my conscious mind. It felt like I was able to build worlds in my writing by painting the walls of a page with the guts of my inner world. 

In the process of writing every day, I found I got better and better at being my own bridge into my inner world. I found I didn’t really need that writing as much or feel called to write poetry. I could either just communicate how I was feeling to someone directly or journal it more clearly without needing the lens, the filter, of poetry. And with this my creativity went elsewhere, helping me uncover the next layer of self- my spiritual body and intuition. 

I think at the root of art is reconnection. To self, others, the world. That’s why we feel so drawn to it whether we say we are an artist or not. Art is expression without being constrained by logic and this allows us to go deeper, to find lost parts of ourselves and share them. To view someone else's art is to connect to them and their experiences and for just a second be enveloped in them. 

Art is a teacher, a bridge into our subconscious, a channel for the ways our body speaks to us. You don’t need to consider yourself an artist to access this bridge. Everyone is an artist. If you have thoughts, ideas, visions, dreams and express them in some way you are an artist. 

If you are working through deep emotions or need that bridge of safety for a time between your deep inner world and your mind, try writing. Poetry, journaling, creative writing, anything. And it doesn't have to be good. Go in with the intention of allowing whatever needs to come through without judgement. Make it a daily or weekly routine. Schedule out time to write or flow with your intuition. If you start and find yourself sitting with an empty page, start with a word or a phrase. Let something flow into your mind or write down the first thing that pops into your head. Or go find a random word generator and start writing with the word that comes up. 

If you feel called to share an art journey or strategy that has helped you uncover your emotional world or understand yourself better, I’d love to hear from you in the comments! Happy writing!