Expressing Without Expressing

When my friend Kerry said “Expressing without expressing”, it was as thought a hundred strings of Christmas lights flickered to life. The concept crystallized and suddenly made sense to me on a thousand levels.
Expressing without expressing is the breathing of life into our emotion and not betraying its source. It’s the un-chesting of unbearable weight under the ever watchful eye of those who put it there, without their notice and who would be offended at its verbal off-loading.

It’s communicating all you wanted to say—screaming out—and being heard, understood and accepted by others while maintaining invisibility from the ones who caused the pain.
Expressing without expressing shares a burden with the attuned. This is why certain music speaks to us, why we cling to certain characters, favor particular stories.
Expressing without expressing is channeling what aches to be said into a nonverbal communication.
Growing up in a home where honest communication is stifled, can cause a stockpile of unspent emotions. Sometimes the result is jarring like abstract painting or beautiful like a symphony. Maybe it’s the true creatives who figure out how to alleviate the backlog of unresolved emotions into something positive.

When I was young I had to figure out how to communicate without using words that would got me into trouble. When I wrote, I got into trouble; Principals office, long parental monologues about the evils of the world, society, exaggerating, lying. I drew, and discovered if you draw people, the red flag goes up.
“Is that supposed to be me?” Defensive. Critical. Retaliative.
I drew mostly cartoons animals. No one reads between the lines when it comes to critters. It’s amazing. I could write a parallel story and as long as it involved animal characters, no one said anything.
“How do you come up with ideas? Where do you get your inspiration?”
“I dunno.” I kept on drawing jello-boned cats and kept my mouth shut.