Do You Find It Easier To Express Feelings In Writing?

Post Reply New Topic

Q) Do You Find It Easier To Express Feelings In Writing?

A) No, I don't express my feeling at all as a rule and I find it hard to distinguish between them when I do experience them.

I definitely do. It is much easier to tell people how I feel via email or text message than it is face-to-face or over the phone. I'm very shy and I always worry about upsetting people, so I tend not to express feelings often.

I am quite good at expressing myself through writing; that's probably one of the reasons why I'm so good at describing things in my fantasy novels.

Yes! The reason I write poetry is to express my feelings because I fail at doing so verbally.

I can write well, very well even, but it takes a lot out of me. Blurting emotions out is easier, but usually I do it in an inappropriate way. At least with the written word, I know how to do it well. Reading and writing were my special interest as a child and I was a professional writer and editor for much of my career.

But this means that writing is very difficult for me: it demands a lot of attention, because I know I'm more capable of it. I've developed skills in expressing myself in social situations (I'm in my late 30s now), so I tend to blurt less and I can use voice tone and other nonverbal means to express myself. One of my favorite ways to express myself now is to borrow the Japanese habit of starting a sentence and trailing off...to let the other person try to fill it in. It has gotten me out of having to find ways to say awkward things pretty well when I've used it!

The main problem is personal letters. They terrify me. There is so much emotion in them. Sometimes they are full of pro-forma words that mean nothing (the weather...what they had for dinner...), and sometimes there is so much emotion in them that it's unbearable (not unpleasant with love letters). I just can't read them. And rather than write them, I just send paintings I've done. I can only write personal letters with extreme focus, and they wipe me out for hours.

So I can express my emotions in writing, but it's very hard.

Does anyone else feel this way?

Yes, it's easier to organize what I want to think. Other people depend more on tone of voice but the wrong words might still be said.

As someone who communicates fairly well both verbally and textually, writing allows me to express emotion without getting caught up in that emotion. For example, writing allows me to convey that I am depressed or lonely without drudging those feelings back up and reducing myself to a sobbing mess, and I rarely ever feel the urge to scream or throw things when expressing rage in text as opposed to speech. It's very useful for maintaining a distance between me and that which triggers my most intense, crippling or destructive feelings.

yes very much so, despite my klutzy moments .
In relationships including my last i have somewhat been accused of hiding behind a screen because in person i can be quit quiet and may seem somewhat different, when really i was trying to just get comfortable around the person and regaining my trust to give to them. Seems sometimes people haven't got the patience to allow you to potentially blossom.
Romantically i have used poetry to portray my feelings in a much deeper word form. Not only to express my positive feelings towards the individual but by also trying to explain poetically the deeper side to myself and how i view the world of which i could never put into conventional communication. I dont do it often but i do do it. I tend to be more Free Verse....

This is an example of something i wrote about 15 years ago after a five year not so good relationship. Was written directly from mind to paper at the time. Was a bit reluctant posting ( omg , actually getting an anxiety rush! haha), but what the hell.

( Sorry if it sounds a little dark! )

Poem

Definitely yes, but I've slowly been learning to convey my feelings verbally as well. But I do feel as though it's still easier for me to do by means of writing, especially when it comes to writing lyrics.

Yes, I find it easier to express feelings, and pretty much anything else, in writing. Lots of reasons--

-- I have time to compose my thoughts.
-- I'm not distracted by the need to puzzle out the other person's facial expressions and body language.
-- I tend to speak slowly, with a lot of pauses because I've forgotten the word for something. Face-to-face, people often jump into the pause or just interrupt me in the middle of a sentence. I make a big effort to not go on and on in a monologue, so it's really frustrating to be interrupted in the first or second sentence out of my mouth. Perhaps as a result, people call me a "good listener." I'm not sure that's a compliment anymore.

I don't get poetry though, so I don't write it.

I'm the opposite. I have difficulty expressing my feelings in writing, but I'm okay when I speak. People tend to get distracted by mistakes in writing more than they do in speaking. If mistakes are made when one is speaking, some people may overlook it, but when it's written, people notice it. Also, I tend to be a very casual writer/speaker. This again, is less acceptable when writing.

These students in my class were raving about all the A's they would get if the teacher based the entire grade on essays. I said that this wouldn't be fair to students who aren't as good at writing. They looked at me like I was an alien.

In school, essays give me more anxiety than tests or presentations give me. For some reason, creative writing doesn't cause me any anxiety.

I don't know, I'm a lot better at Feeling my emotions now then a year ago or maybe even less.

I find it harder to make emotional, fictional characters than to express my feelings via biographic material.