Beware of Bloggers on Angst

I wrote the other day about all the stuff I've been writing furiously over the past two months.  How bad was this?  It was a daily ritual.  I'd feel some level of angst over something...it didn't matter how big or small...it didn't matter what it was...and I'd instinctively reach for the keyboard.  The next step was to pound out whatever was in my head in an almost Hunter Thompson-esque mescaline & ether fueled rage.  It would literally fly from my toxic neurons to my fingertips, as if there was some kind of sewer line connecting the two.  Some of it went into private blogs, some of it went into documents that I would type, print and save in my special "angst" folder, ever at the ready.  None of it was ever used for anything.  All of it was so very, very dysfunctional.  It was all so very raw.


Almost all of it has been deleted, shredded or discarded.  "Almost" because in looking at the sum of it over the past few days, there were bits and pieces that made some sense.  That's been saved.  The rest of it ended up becoming destroyed bits/bytes or little scraps of paper in an anonymous garbage can I found in my travels.  Anyone emptying the trash in this undisclosed location...provided that they had the interest & some scotch tape...would be in for some interesting reading.  Luckily my name isn't on any of it.


Am I ashamed of this behavior?  Not really.  I sure as sin would not be writing about it now if I were, that's for sure.  


No, there is a lesson in this for me, and probably others also predisposed to angst-fueled writing jags.  The lesson?  Writing "it" down can be a form of therapy, but it can also be an exercise in illusion.  I wasn't writing to understand my feelings; I was using to try and somehow empty them.  That was the illusion:  they are still here.  Writing furiously simply made me feel worse, not better.


I still write about stuff that I'm feeling, good or bad.  But it's more measured now.  I don't react and write.  I think and write.  More important than that?  I understand that feelings are to be felt, not emptied onto a page and somehow wished into oblivion.