Therapy

First, this:




So appropriate! I love it!!

In other therapy news, I've started writing haiku. Not because I particularly enjoy haiku (I don't) and not because I particularly enjoy poetry (I don't), but rather because it is amazingly therapeutic. No really. Hear me out.

I frequently find myself wanting to choke someone. Or slap the hell out of them. Or inflict some other sort of bodily harm. Since society tends to frown on doing these sorts of things I've had to find other outlets for my frustrations. For a long time the solution was to just sit and let it fester. After finally realizing how toxic it is to sit around pissed all the time (figuratively, of course), I just started to let things roll off my back. Unless whatever I was pissed about was going to directly affect me, I didn't let it bother me. Er, at least not in the same way I would have before.

Enter Michelle, a long-time online friend, but someone who I'm pretty sure could walk into my living room and kick her shoes off and feel like we've known each other all our lives. She's amazingly smart, very witty, and to top it off she's creative. Creativity goes a long way with me. I have pretty much zero, so when I meet someone who is really with it, and who is super cool to boot, well...let's just say it makes me happy.

One day Michelle was at work and not having the best day ever. She works in a group home and that alone is an amazing thing on so many levels. One day she Twittered that, in place of slapping the hell out of someone (in a meeting I think), she was instead writing haiku about them. Genius! Sheer genius!

I find writing haiku to be extremely challenging when I'm in a normal (not pissed) state of mind. When I'm pissed and my brain is on fire it is often difficult to put a thought together, let alone try to write poetry. Further, haiku follows a challenging structure in that you only have a total of 17 syllables to work with in the entire piece. If you want to be strict about it and add the seasonal reference AND the caesura, well, that just adds more restriction to what you can do.

I took Michelle's idea and worked it into my own setting. Now when I get pissed you can bet I'm working on a poem either in my brain or that I've already scratched a few ideas out.

The therapeutic effect comes in to play at this point. As I said earlier, when I'm mad or upset it is hard for me to put a single thought together some times. Now when I sit down to compose a piece of poetry I am literally forcing myself to put thoughts together, and to have them make sense. And of course since the poetry of choice is haiku, they not only have to make sense (at least to me) but they also have to be structured! Writing haiku has turned into an amazing mental exercise for me and a total win-win situation.

In the act of forcing myself to put thoughts together I am actually doing a type of meditation. That in and of itself is calming. Taking those thoughts and working them into a structure is an amazing challenge. I have no choice but to find a way to say what I want in a very limited form. That is very, very hard. Are you seeing the benefits yet?

A. Calming
B. Mental exercise
C. Having a finished product to be proud of though probably not one to publish.

I <3 therapy haiku and I <3 Michelle for sharing such an awesome idea.

Finally, here's an example of one of my finer pieces. It ignores the caesura and season but it gets the point across. Enjoy.

i feel betrayed now
being deceitful is rude
my respect is gone