Читать книгу Rewrite Your Life - Jessica Lourey - Страница 15

At its most basic, a catharsis is an emotional release or a cleansing. You've likely felt catharsis after confessing to a professional or venting to a friend. My first memory of catharsis came when I was seven. My family had moved from a medium-sized city to the small town of Paynesville, Minnesota, right before I began second grade. I had to hit the ground running. New school, new kids, new rules, and I was the kid wearing homemade jeans and garage sale tennis shoes with teeth stained gray due to an antibiotic I was injected with as an infant. As a scraggly bonus, I fiercely refused to comb any part of my hair that I couldn't directly see, which meant that whoever sat behind me got a real treat.

Suffice it to say, I was not fitting in.

That first day on the playground, three girls, their names mercifully lost to time, cornered me by the slide. The one with rainbow barrettes spoke for them all. “Where you from?”

Probably she was only curious. Maybe she was trying to be my friend. For sure, I blew it.

“St. Cloud. My dad's an actor on TV.”

That's what's called a BIG FAT LIE. My dad had just quit his job as a cartographer to make a go at his dream of being a full-time alcoholic. What black alley that lie lurched out of, I'll never know.

“No way!”

“I swear on my mom's life.” The air rushed out of me as soon as I said it. Whoof. Like I'd punched myself in the stomach. My mom was everything to me—security, safety, food, love, my oasis in a hurricane of a home life—and I'd just lied her life away. Talk about following the shit with the shovel.

You better believe the girls wanted to play with me after that. Everyone wanted to play with me. I should have been thrilled, but I was sick at what I'd done. I spent the rest of the day weeping in the nurse's office. When she offered to call my mom to come pick me up, I demurred, positive that if my mom wasn't already dead, she'd certainly croak on the drive in.

At the end of the day, I could barely drag myself off the bus and into the house. Against all odds, my mom was there, dead lady walking. She took one look at me before bundling me inside a hug.

“What's wrong?”

I rolled over on myself like a professional narc.

And you know what? I felt a thousand pounds lighter, imminent punishment for lying notwithstanding. I'd been hauling that weight all day. It felt great to lay it down.

Catharsis really can be that immediate and that effective. Think of cathartic sharing as removing the lid from a bubbling pot, where the steam is any extreme emotion—guilt, fear, anger—that has been bottled up. Engaging a negative experience by talking or writing about it, or a version of it, releases the more intense emotions associated with it. Catharsis “lets off steam.”