Brain Dumping

It’s been almost a month and a half since I made a challenge to myself to blog every weekday (while taking weekends off) and I made an unexpected realization during this time.  I often hear writers say that writing is therapeutic for them and when my sister (in law) started blogging, she told me that it had become therapeutic for her as well.  I understood that, but I never thought that would be the case for me.  I understood it in the way that non-work related creative outlets that I engage in, like painting, photography, drawing, etc were therapeutic for me.  I consider writing to be a creative outlet, but I do not consider myself to be talented or necessarily good at it, but I enjoy it.  I think I thought that things you had a talent for could become therapeutic, not things that you were not talented at.  Therefore, I never thought I would see it as therapeutic.

I was wrong.

My brain is always in overdrive and only semi-shuts down when I (finally) fall asleep at night.  My brain is constantly buzzing with thoughts, ideas, and random things.  Blogging here has given me an outlet to dump the contents of my brain.  I worried that I might run out of things to write about when I made the challenge to myself, but my running Evernote list of things to write about continues to thrive and grow.  I dump thoughts from my brain at random times into the list and then choose something when I sit down to write.  I am finding that my brain feels…less full.  I feel like I have literally removed some of the thoughts that were taking up space in my brain.  I’m also starting to think that my growing list might also indicate that outside of writing, I might talk too much.  Does a lack of things to write about correlate to a lack of things to talk about?

It’s therapy.

My brain feels more rested in a weird way and I think it’s because I have been blogging.  I think dumping my brain out here on this blog is giving my brain and thoughts room to stretch their legs and move around.  I never thought that I would be one of those people to say it, but blogging for me has become therapeutic!