Something that always seemed to irk me in my late teen years was when mentors, friends, and professors would ask the same dreaded question, “How have you grown from this experience?” There was hardly a time when I didn’t fudge the answer a little. “Well, um, I’ve become more (insert positive adjective here)… I guess.” It always felt a bit like sealing a package that wasn’t quite ready to be all tied up yet, or covering a gap in the wrapping with a big, shiny bow instead of attending to the cause of this “incompleteness”. Within many of us lies a desire for wholeness and a sense of finality. To package up experiences, good or bad, and compartmentalize them. “Well, what I learned from this toxic relationship was…” or “what living in Africa has taught me is…” are phrases sometimes spoken all too quickly. The problem with this tendency to “sort” out our emotional experiences so immediately is that once we feel that we have defined and vocalized how they have changed us, we often feel no further need to revisit said experiences. And when we avoid rethinking and redefining certain moments or seasons of our lives, we may lose touch with real, underlying emotions that linger with them, untouched and raw. Not to mention, we may be so caught up in our troubles or revelations that we fail to see their true impact. In our desire to immediately process, we sometimes end up forcing understanding, just to ensure other people and ourselves, “this is what I got out of it.” After all, we wouldn’t want to spend months going through hardship or adventure or newness without learning anything, right?
Verbal and written processing are beautiful tools, and especially for introverts like myself, it does wonders to be sort of, well, forced into the dreaded act of sharing emotions. By saying things aloud and putting them on paper, they become solidified and feel more real. Both verbal and written forms of processing are good for different reasons: I’m always more honest talking to my journal but more logical talking to my friends. The act of being vulnerable can expose and help heal newly discovered wounds, shed light upon buried feelings, and bring praise to positive change.
Since the fall semester has been over for several weeks now, and 2017 is already amidst us, I encourage you not to shy away from those experiences and events that occurred in 2016 and have left you unsettled. Maybe they already transformed you, physically, mentally or emotionally, or maybe what once felt like a season of "nothingness" can now be reflected on and understood as something bigger. By suggesting that we sometimes feel the need to process things too quickly and have them be over with, I’m not encouraging an obsession with or dwelling on the past, but simply the occasional visitation of experiences you feel have transformed you. Rather, instead of sealing your boxes once they have been filled, leave them open with the prospect that their contents will be revisited, rearranged, and reused for the understanding of future experiences.
