The venerable and oft-knowing Google search bar defines the term "catharsis" as "the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions."
Neat, right?
Strong or repressed emotions. Likely strong AND repressed emotions, but Google, ever the ally, won't call me out like that. And Google had something else to say about "catharsis" as I scanned a little further in my initial search. In the majority of the blurbs provided by online dictionaries, the "releasing" portion of the original definition is explicitly marked to be art.
That's right, folks. Art. Whatever your fancy may be, your art can be the key to prying out those feelings you say you've locked up tightly but also continue to feel on a daily basis (I speak from a brutal amount of experience on that part, believe me). Craft a poem to remember. Belt your lungs out. Paint a masterpiece. Dance with fierce passion. Whatever your art form of choice may be, take and hurl it across the canvas of your life with your own personal brand of gusto.
And what then? In the context of the word catharsis, what will "releasing" these pent up feelings offer? Once released, where will they go? Is there simply a hope that the chaos of your emotions yields some vague moment of clarity?
More than that, I think.
The word "catharsis" speaks of a releasing of emotion, not a clarification of the situation. Unleashing your art on the world, as beautiful as it will be, will not change the circumstances that surround those strong, repressed emotions. Those will remain the way that they are. The difference comes with the freedom to feel, to understand, and to move forward from the troubles that plague you. In other words, the change happens to the "repressed" bit.
Pushing emotions down deep inside of yourself is the fastest way to feed their power. The more you try to ignore the pain pulsing in your heart, the more you stockpile it down in your soul to come back and strike you later with multiplied force. Repressing your emotions doesn't mean dispersing or fixing them. They're still lurking, and the more you push, the less room you'll have.
Releasing them works, but not unless you have somewhere for them to go. If you open the floodgates to rid yourself of the toxins with no plan in mind, it'll just turn into a defense mechanism psychology calls "displacement." "Displacement" is the person who gets fired from work and comes home and screams at their neighbor for the dog in the yard. It's the child who fails a test and turns on their sibling the moment they see them afterward. "Displacement" is a place for emotions to go when there is nowhere else when repression has failed, when a person needs a target and needs one now. It just...it just kind of hurts worse.
Catharsis through art isn't repression. It isn't a free-for-all release. Artistic catharsis is best described as a channel. It provides a place for emotions to go other than inappropriately into the situation causing the strain or painfully into the world around you with zero control. When the world is caving in around you in every way possible, art reaches out a hand and gives you a moment to be in control again - of your words, of your actions, of your emotional processing, of your mind and heart. The power of your feelings fuels the fires of your creative drive more than you would ever think possible. It moves you forward.
If not in any other way, I can, at the very least, describe my own experience. As an avid lover of writing, I have written countless letters to send to no one. I've composed lots of likely terrible poetry aggressively describing my feelings at like 3 in the morning. I've written short stories based on life happenings, and I've given them endings based on the emotions I'm feeling towards the situations. Based on the emotions of any given day, even. Repression equates to stagnation.
The less you try to feel, the less you can move and act in your own lifetime. So we fight to move onward through every means we know how. We fight to bear the pain, to reach more of the gain. Art leads us not to specific checkpoints, since life doesn't make those, but rather through the storms we face every single day, letting us live our lives to the fullest. Artistic catharsis releasing our emotions so we can feel, we can fight, and we can face whatever comes next.
Catharsis is a word I love. It implies using, as Kelly Clarkson would say, what doesn't kill me to make me stronger. It implies using my pain for my own gain. It implies a sense of power that I can seize at any moment if I can bring myself to believe that the trials I face serve a bigger and better purpose in my life than just to beat me down. They're no match for my emotional floods anyways.
No matter what, I'm going to keep moving forward.
