My therapist recently pointed out that I avoid talking about certain topics.

This didn’t surprise me. I’ve been doing that for years.

When there’s something I don’t know how to process, I just shut it down and run away. Which usually means I turn on a podcast or Netflix or Amazon Prime. Sometimes it’s just easier to escape what scares me than to face it head on.

I think this is why I’ve found it so hard to write any long form posts or do any vlogging over the past year or so. For example, last Saturday I recorded a vlog and rambled on for twenty minutes about nothing. I felt lost in my own head.

That sounds melodramatic, I know, but it’s true. That’s kind of how my brain is right now in this season of life. I have lots and lots of thoughts and feelings but I’m kind of lost as to what to do or where to go with it all.

Which is terrifying in itself because my job is literally to process thoughts. To think about ideas and talk about it on paper… yet that’s exactly what I’ve been running away from.

I’ve never actually put it in those terms before. (I’m getting this for the first time with you guys!) This past year, I’ve been facing the biggest writer’s block of my life and maybe the reason is because my brain is loaded down with all kinds of mental “laundry,” as it were, that I’m refusing to deal with.

It’s hard to get work done when your workspace is completely cluttered with non-work related junk. (In this scenario, the workspace is my brain.)

The thing Joseph, my therapist, pointed out was anytime our car accident and my Mom’s death came up, I changed the topic. I had no idea I was doing that, but I could see what he meant.

This kind of surprised me because I wouldn’t have thought that was the thing I was avoiding. I’ve generally been very open about my grief.

But I’m realizing that, while I may have worked it out logically, I’m not sure I completely faced the pain and processed–in my heart–what it meant to lose Mom. I ran away to other things, people, and places.

Even now, I’ve written and re-written the above paragraph a dozen times because I want to change the subject. I want to talk about how that was all a long time ago or how I’m not writing this to make people feel sorry for me. I’m tempted to clarify that, perhaps, you haven’t lost your mom or been in a car accident, but maybe you’ve experienced “such-and-such” and can identify. I’m trying to pass off the gravity of what happened when I was 17.

I did a lot of blogging after our accident, which felt as if I was processing my grief (and I was). But I think what I was really doing was trying to justify Mom’s death. I was trying to make something good come out of the mind-numbing trauma I had just experienced.

The scary thought I never allowed myself to face was: “This trauma–this eruption–doesn’t make any sense and I don’t know how I’m going to recover from it.”

Instead of processing it, I tried making my pain useful.

I told my therapist that I don’t even know what it means to “process my pain.”

“What does that look like? What do I do?’

He explained the psychiatric definition of “process” is to get to the place where I can talk about these painful experiences and feel those “negative” emotions without actually putting myself back in that spot. I think that’s what he said–something like it anyways. I still don’t really know what it means. I guess it’s a process.

And I guess it means I keep going to therapy but stop changing the subject and answer honestly when he asks “How does that make you feel.”

I suppose it means that every now and then I should put down my iPhone and allow myself to think those scary thoughts.

*cringe*

What do you think it means?