So, for my birthday a friend bought me a book of writing prompts – 300 to be exact. So Mike and I decided it would be fun to go through and do these together.
There are a few rules:
1. It’s time restrained – 7 minutes
2. You can’t look at the prompt until you’re ready to type
3. You have to stop, even mid-sentence, when the timer goes off
4. No edits after the timer
Prompt: How do you soothe yourself when you are upset?
MIKE:
When I am upset I have a few options to make myself feel better. Some are productive, some are not…
Productive: go for bike or run. I need to make sure I do not have music. Listening to the gears grind or my feet hit the ground opens the space in my brain to get away from my counterproductive thoughts.
Counter productive methods: I really like to to eat… Ice cream, chips, trail mix, fries, left overs and then some more left overs. If eating is filling the hole in my feelings, I turn to having a few beers. This never really turns out great, but luckily hasn’t turned out tragic. The last few years I’ve implemented a rule not to drink when I am really mad or sad. Just sets me back to far in the whole thing.
Prayer is the best way I’ve found to soothe myself when it comes down to it. When I stop relying on myself to meet the needs of this world and start looking to God I find real peace in every situation. Sometimes I have to take the edge of my emotions with a run or frosty before I come up for air and get real peace through the Holy Spirit.
Another question is if I will even acknowledge I am upset or why I am upset. To do that I might open notability and just start dumping my thoughts in a note. No outline, no deletes (maybe some autocorrects), no real plan. It takes a few minutes to get the juices flowing. But in about 10 minutes I normally have a better idea what I am dwelling on and what is probably
KANDACE:
I go to bed. Ha. I’m kidding, I do that when I’m scared. Seriously.
When I’m upset, I do a few things, it depends on how/why I’m upset I guess. Most of it comes down to distraction.
I like to clean when I’m upset. Mostly in an organizing fashion. It makes me feel like I have control over something when everything else seems to be spiraling. This means digging into the closets full….
I also like to run. There was one time, Mike and I were out of town somewhere and I just felt like everything was going wrong and I couldn’t do right by any standard. We went for a run and we were talking about everything, I was just trying to make sense of it all, and according to Mike, when I do that I run really fast. So he was struggling to keep up with me and I’m out in front of him with tears rolling down my face when we come up to a park with families and kids everywhere. A few people looked at us questioningly, which is fair, I likely looked like I was running from Mike and that he was the reason I was crying. I just broke down and sobbed. I turned around to Mike, who was clueless that I had been crying at all, and he just held me in the middle of this park. Once the cry was out, I was good to go.
That’s another soothing thing – crying in the shower. I don’t know why I like it but I do. I don’t know if it’s the feeling of tears all around me or that you can’t tell the tears from the water droplets.
Of course I also like jamming out when I’m upset. The music definitely ranges depending on why I’m upset though. It always has to be something I can sing along with though. It could be B*tch by Meredith Brooks or it could be pretty much anything by Lauren Daigle. It’s really all over the place.
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