Morning Pages Review

I have been diligently writing three, 8-1/2" X 11" pages, in long hand writing since August 26th. Four months. On my four month anniversary, I shredded every page.

No remorse, nor any wish to re-read a single sentence I had written. I shredded the pages as easily as I throw out the trash. There was no epiphany. No nugget of wisdom. Four months of whining, negativity, list making, dollar accounting, budgeting, lists of shoulda, coulda, woulda's. Gone.

It actually feels good to shred every word and toss it into the garbage. That is what it was to me. Exorcising my morning demons with no desire to revisit them.

I stopped writing three mornings ago. I cannot say if I feel better or worse for the lack of purging. Perhaps a little worse. I find myself drawn into the depths of my thoughts instead of the purge and release factor while writing my morning pages.

Will I start writing again? I think so. 

As much as I felt like those pages drained me of all the words I woke up with and left me wordless when it came to write anything here in my blog, I do feel that allowing myself the freedom to write anything and everything that came to mind was therapeutic. 

The magic of putting pen to page rather than typing? Surprisingly amazing. The times I have sat down at the computer to respond to an email or type out a text have felt excruciating. Picking the right word out of the air feels daunting. The shortest of replies take an extraordinary amount of time to type. 

There is something to these pages. Shredding them felt as cathartic as burning them. There were no deep dark secrets. The pages consisted of a side of myself I do not care to nurture.

Miss Negative Nellie is alive and well but I have destroyed the evidence of her existence. My fear is, if I don't purge these words in the morning, they may sneak out during the course of living my day. 

To err is human, they say. I'd rather err grandly in the privacy of my morning pages and do my best with the knowledge I usually find at the end of my third page. 

Morning pages? I'll be back ...