Recently. a good friend of mine confessed to me that she was swimming in negative and unproductive thoughts. As is true with all of us, these moments in time can come and go, but when they come, they can sometimes linger, creating an unforgiving and deceptive barrier between ourselves and the world, almost even distorting our perceptions of the world, and our place within it.
I asked her to put them all down in writing, to expel them from the endless loop in her head, to purge them from her psyche so she could move forward unhindered, so she could again interact with the world without the dispiriting filter casting a certain darkness over everything.
I told her she could either put it all in writing and keep it to herself, or throw it away, or she could send it to me. Minutes later, in a text message, was this beautifully written and heartbreaking list, each line beginning with "I hate...." And immediately upon reading it, I'd decided I wanted to turn it into something beautiful. I wanted to illustrate how big these thoughts, this energy, can seem and feel when it's on top of us, how much smaller they get as we let them go, and finally, the rest of the world awaiting our return on the other side.
