There have been many debates on if things like art could be similar to being kind of like a therapy for some people. I know for me anyway I listen to music when I get into moods or I put on makeup. Lately I haven't been wearing makeup but I have been listening to a lot of new music that has come out recently, and by new music I mean Harry Styles' album on repeat until one A.M. This year was the first time I started going to counseling and to be honest its helped me through so much even though I started going near the end of the year. I will most likely be going back to counseling when I get back to school. However, it is absolutely okay to ask for help when you need it.
So when you go to counseling it is a very private thing, the counselors are not allowed to tell people things unless you give them legal consent to do so. However, I will share this one bit of advice that I got from my counselor, that writing things down or drawing actually helps get a lot of emotions that you are currently feeling out of your mind. Because typing on a computer does not take that long venting on things like twitter or even making a simple word document does not help as much as it takes to actually write things out. When my counselor said that it all made sense to me because I write everything down. Nothing ever gets put in my phone because I know I will forget about it.
When I got home from school this summer I knew that the three counseling sessions would not be enough for me so I know I will have to go back when the new semester at Penn State Harrisburg. So I went to a local discount store to see if I could find an empty journal with no lines so I could start a bullet journal. Well I never got a bullet journal started but I did take up drawing painting and writing. I get inspired by pretty much anything from Marvel movies to all kinds of music. Sometimes my face becomes my canvas and I experiment with new summer looks. I myself am not very good at drawing so I like to just paint random things. A few weeks ago I painted a picture for three hours and it was so calming. It was like I was able to get out all of my emotions in one painting.
Yesterday I was listening to Harry Styles' album and one of the songs really hit home for me. So I wrote out the lyric from the song that hit me the most then I wrote about my feelings at the moment about a recent friendship I ended almost a year ago. But in all honesty I feel so much better about my feelings because I wrote about raw emotion and now its permanently on paper. So if you are having second thoughts about starting a journal I definitely think you should.