This One Thing Sets Me Right When I Melt Down

Plus, I Verbed an Adjective

I did it again and it feels FAN-FRACKING-TASTIC!

Which is soooo preferable to the doom stress meltdown I had been having.

Photo by Juan Ordonez on Unsplash

. . .

It was time to write an article.

But this time I wasn’t writing for someone else, someone who had hired me. That’s easy. I can crank out articles left and right that way, just tell me what you want. Since 1997 I’ve been a professional writer (off and on a bit as I raised kids).

But write an article for ME?

For MY Substack? (My other one, Inside Healing.)

Saying what I’VE been trying to say for over 10 years without an echo or whisper of interest? *gasp!*

Or was my inner clutch about speaking yet again into the void—except that someone MIGHT LISTEN on Substack?

Muh-muh-muh—MELTdown!

I triggered so hard I could start a second career as a vice. Instantly, I was overwhelmed with sadness and hopelessness. Insane amounts of it. (Just where had THAT been lurking within me?)

In a blink, I couldn’t work, couldn’t concentrate, and my entire day ground to a halt. Couldn’t even bring myself to do something else. My higher brain went offline due to a flood in the lower stem.

But the “poor me”s is not where I want to go here. The details don’t matter. The point is that my thoughts rendered me useless and I didn’t write or do anything for the rest of the day.

Next day, my brain woke up still playing the same song. Wah, wah, wah.

On the bright side, in hindsight, it was succeeding in freezing me… and saving me from actually writing. Hmm.

. . .

But lo, I was saved by my poetry accountability partner! We have coffee once a week. And we co-work once a week on another day. It’s working—I’m building a portfolio of poems, and almost done publishing my first book (due mid-2026). She’s finishing her poetic memoir.

“Do you think,” she said after I had poured out my tale, “That you might want to write a poem about that?”

Pin drop.

Mic drop.

Whatever the kids are saying nowadays, it dropped.

And I have to love her intuition for not triggering my allergic reaction to being told what to do. She did not blurt out, “You should write a poem about that!” Nor do the inside-out woowoo version: “Does a poem want to be written about that?” 🤢🤮

Nope, my awesome friend simply asked. Leaving it up to me.

And YES

was the only

possible

answer.

So we turned it into a working morning. My poetry Word file got located and opened. After typing in the date and my self-prompt, I prepared myself.

I allowed myself feel all of what I was feeling.

. . .

For decades, writing poetry is how I have purged myself of emotion that doesn’t seem to remove itself any other way.

I’ve tried crying it out. I never, ever feel better, always still sad. Probably I could cry forever.

I’ve tried hitting things that can’t break, but my hand erupted with a goose-egg doing that for what became the last time.

Screaming hurts my throat, no relief to be had.

I’ve tried talking issues out with friends, and they are infinitely patient with me, but that only feels good briefly. It doesn’t make the original pain go away. Plus most of my upsets are so personal, so why-did-I-react-like-that, that I don’t want to tell anyone!

But writing poetry, man. Poetry wins.

Putting my distress into poetry is the most effective and gentle cure for emotional constipation in the world. For me at least. No drugs or chemicals needed (well, my new keyboard did come with a State of California warning).

Poetry works every time. Somehow, writing expunges the pain and negativity.

In my youth my poems went into paper notebooks. Now those feelings leak out my fingertips into the ethers as I type. (Thank you for disposing of those for me, ethers.)

So I closed my eyes and felt my feels.

It was, to use a technical term, icky-poo.

How I purge emotions via poetry is to write out everything I am thinking. Yell at what I, as an overly kind person, would never raise my voice to in real life. Say what I want to say. Be super honest about EVERYTHING. That’s the only rule.

It feels good, too.

Even better than that, now that I’ve been writing poems for 50 years and have worked as an editor for 30, I know that emotion is what poetry is all about!

You share your deepest, secretest emotions in your words and your readers will feel things too. They know those feelings. We’ve all had them.

Feelings make for good poetry. (Eventually: My purge poetry usually needs a good polish.)

For this trigger, I tried to think of another instance when I’d felt like this.

But I couldn’t see across that ocean. No answer from my poetic depths. The one image that did jump into my head was lemmings.

Lemmings are little groupthink rodents that run in crowds. They will dash right over a cliff because the lemming in front of them followed the one in front of it off the cliff. (Lemmings made a huge impression on me in my single-digit years. I should maybe fact-check my memory.)

That one thought I had, “It’s time to write my first article,” panicked and ran like a lemming, straight out into the nothingness. Then all my initiative, enthusiasm, capabilities, drive, self-discipline and joy ran right out after it.

So I started with that:

How could you not predict the future
When observing a band of lemmings
Racing towards a cliff’s edge?

Seems obvious. Each critter dooms the one behind it. Yeah, that’s something.

Then I had a weird thought. And here’s how poetry…often (I almost said sometimes)… surfaces new stuff. Surprises. Things you didn’t know were in you.

Like when you clean out a drain with a coathanger and find—oh, never mind that image.

You find new things. Your writing fingers and mind conspire to pop something into your poem that you didn’t even think was related.

Always, it’s a good thing. Or at least interesting.

Out it came, the thing I didn’t know I was writing about:

Unfortunately for me, in too many conversations,
People turn into lemmings before my eyes.
In the space between their words,
Like water parting around an invisible rock,
They reveal the fears that run their lives.
Coping mechanisms and self-lies
Arise into visibility
Like nipples in a cold wind.
The curtains they hide behind as the Wizard of Self,
Become sheer,
Not to let the light in, also unfortunately,
But to reveal their secrets.

I might change that metaphor about the cold wind, so embarrassing. What else arises from nowhere? I am perplexed. Let me know in the comments.

And then the real issue came out. Advice given. Pointers pointed out. Even recommendations some had paid me to give them—

Ignored.

Prepare yourself.

I do not ask for this.
Yet with all this data displayed,
Their next move
(To avoid the imminent cliff
And its negative space
Looming ahead of them)
Also becomes clear to me.
But still I am surprised
Every time
My recommendations are met
With a look of offense
Or the wandering eye of confusion,
As if I had misunderstood
As if I’m the crazy one—
Not them violently hobbling themselves,
Not them treating their dreams
Like they wouldn’t treat their worst enemy.
Not them.

Yeah! Can’t say that spit out loud. Venting and it feels so good. Nobody has to see this. Who would ever see this?

I paused and reread, astonished at what had come out of me.

Now none of this is high poetry yet. I am venting and healing. Hang in here with me.

Reflecting, I concluded the piece like this:

Slowly over years I have come to realize
That they can’t see behind their own curtains,
And don’t recognize their inner light
When I hold up the mirror.
Stating my insights without being asked
Does not help them see,
Does not sheer the curtains,
Does not set up Detour signs,
And they go on struggling.
My words fall to the floor unused
Like toenail clippings or
Like beautiful lemmings
Blindly tumbling over a precipice.

Sigh. I felt better. And sad. Poor beautiful lemmings.

Yes, I verbed an adjective in there: sheer, referring back to the curtains. Live on the edge, man. And the callback at the end cracked me up.

To heal, I reread the poem and felt what I was saying. I edited a few lines slightly to the version you see here.

It occurred that it reads like a poem about a Mental Projector in Human Design, which I am. Mental Projectors are great at perceptive advice. But the recommendation for this profile to stay sane is to NOT give advice until and unless asked. This life lesson is a hard one, to learn to accept that we are all learning our way through life, and that process may value negative feedback. You can’t save everyone you want to save.

I spent some time thinking about that lesson, digesting this aspect of what was blocking my life flow.

I felt noticeably better.

. . .

The punchline to this story is that after rereading the poem, I realized that this poem topic was NOT QUITE the issue that had triggered me. It was related, which was probably why I felt half better.

What I did next to feel fully better is for the next article. (I’ll put the link here when I write it.)

What will you write about today?

Happy writing and healing,

Daria

Q: Do you write to digest your emotions too? What did you get from my tale? Lmk in the comments!

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