Wow. I haven’t touched this blog in over a week. I hit a wall, and no matter how much I told myself I SHOULD write something, in the words of my 4(?) year old self…”I can’t want to!” So, no posts.

There’s one more day to this writing challenge, but I can tell you now, based on my schedule tomorrow (Halloween!) I will not have time for thinking, much less thinking AND writing.

I have to say that I did learn a few things with this exercise — speaking up is something that takes effort, and I think in most cases, it’s worth the work.

The last kind of Speaking Up I think I’ll talk about tonight, is Speaking Up for myself, to myself. When the anxiety and depression are at war in my brain, and I feel both helpless and hopeless, one of my “go to” practices to restore peace is the Think/Feel/Want assignment. When I don’t know what to do next, I grab a journal and pen complete these three sentences:

I think…
I feel…
I want…

And I keep going and going until I come to an understanding (of myself, or perhaps another), or I develop a resolution about an action I can take that will help me.

This practice helps me review my thoughts (maybe I think something that isn’t true, or is an assumption, and needs clarification), my feelings (what am I really feeling — a lot of my feelings start out masquerading as anger, but end up being very different), and my desires (this is the toughest one). Speaking up and letting myself verbalize what I actually want — that there is powerful stuff!

(And I guess there’s a tie-in here after all. It’s only taken me 40 odd years to go from “I can’t want…” to “I want…”) Huh.

My topic for the Write31Days.com project is “Speaking Up”.
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