Day 265 (Emotional Health)

I sometimes worry that I have diarrhea of the mouth. Anytime anything significant happens to me, I recount the event over and over and over again to anyone that will listen, and I actually find myself going into story mode where I realized I tell the story in almost the exact same way that I had told the story the previous 5 or 6 times. I even got really embarrassed one time when one of my friends pointed this fact out to me, because he had been around for multiple tellings of the same story because I kept encountering new people who hadn't heard it yet.

Isn't that that best way to tell a story though? The new person hasn't heard it yet, so it won't matter to them how you told the story to someone else, and after telling a story a few times, you find the rhythm of it, what works in the story and what doesn't, what if anything needs to be left out of the telling. Once you figure out the best way to deliver the story, what's the point of varying it?

Unfortunately, it seems like I do this most when bad things happen. When good things happen, I often think, "Wow! That's really cool! I can't wait to tell people about that!" But, more often than not, I end up forgetting about the incident.

Not so with bad things. Obviously, if something is bad enough, you need to talk to someone right away to help you process it. This is probably what gets the storytelling off the ground, the initial re-hash of the event. If something good happens, you have the luxury of waiting until you come across someone you would like to share the story with, which is usually much later than the telling of a bad event, because you weren't searching a person out to tell the story to.

Which then brings me back to my "diarrhea of the mouth" statement at the beginning. I think counseling is a good thing and helpful for everybody. Now, even though I say that, I myself have never been to, nor plan on going to, a counsellor/psychologist/psychiatrist, what have you. I remember reading one time that 90% of counseling is done outside of a professional's office. After reading that, I realized how much counseling I had done for my friends, family and kids in my youth group. I also realized how much I depend on my friends and family to counsel me when I'm having emotional trouble.

The thing is, I hold so little back when I am hurting, I just release it out there to whoever is listening, as long as I have a reasonable amount of trust in that person. Then I find another person and do it all over again. Then, someone else, and another, and another. Depending on how bad the situation is, I will sometimes cycle back to people that I've already talked to.

So yes, the last two days were emotionally horrible, but I think I'm mostly better now, and it's all thanks to my diarrhea of the mouth.