Puncturing the shell

When I was in college I was given a book by a relative on short story writing. The book seemed to have a reasonable method. You would start by writing a description of some emotionally laden or traumatic event that happened to you. Then you would go through various steps to revise it, beginning by switching to the third person, and going through various exercises. I decided to try it out, but it's a sign of just how difficult it was to process my crazy life with my dad that I couldn't think of a single emotionally laden event that had happened to me. Seems odd now as it is definitely giving me a lot of writing fuel, but the events were so close and I was compartmentalizing them, pretending that when they were out of sight they no longer existed. I've always had a tendency to not connect the dots in my head, keeping them separate. As a result I am somewhat emblematic of my profession as a professor, being pretty absent-minded. On the one hand, I could trace this to the mental gymnastics I carried out to stay sane when I was young, but seeing it reflected in so many of my colleagues, it could simply be my own inherent personality.

 Perhaps I can track down that book and try it over. I'm finding this frequent writing to be therapeutic, and I can also see how honing the writer's art  could be a source of artistic satisfaction. I ended up not following through back in college because I couldn't put my heart into it. People in my family tend to be isolated from their heart center. We tend to bottle up our emotions so tightly that we are not even aware they exist until they demand to be recognized. In me this manifests in periodic "crises" where the lie I have built up about myself and the world gets too out of sync with my heart and the rubber band snaps. My dad's psychoses tend also to come in waves, and perhaps something similar is going on with him. When he blew up and punched my grandmother, this was perhaps the outlet or repressed anger and frustration.

After I got sober the first time, having an emotional crisis which I needed to deal with, there was a period of time where I felt I was very open-hearted and in tune with the suffering of others. After a while I built up another ego shell around the soft spot in the middle, and I began to shut off from myself and others, losing my noble goals and thinking to manage samsara*. This cycle has repeated itself in smaller and larger waves since then. So the good news is that my inner wisdom is strong enough to periodically break through the shell cutting off my heart center and move me steadily forward in understanding myself and the world.

*Samsara is a Buddhist term which could be translated as "conditioned existence."  It refers to our tendency to grip onto phenomenal reality as inherently real, permanent and a source of genuine satisfaction.