Lesson 5. Release

What do you do with the pain you can’t talk about?

In this episode of The Time Smith, we go deeper into the lesson of coping—not through venting to others, but by exercising something more sacred: writing. Through powerful personal memories, Joseph revisits two defining moments in his life that taught him how to release pain onto the page when words failed him in real life.

From a fifth-grade journal entry to a 16-year-old’s midnight letter to the desert sky, this isn’t just about processing trauma—it’s about reclaiming your inner voice when no one else is listening.

🛠️ You'll hear:

• The difference between venting and healing
• Why journaling can become your most private form of freedom
• How silence, isolation, and unspoken thoughts can be transformed
• Why writing isn’t just release—it’s resurrection

If you’ve ever been stuck in your own head, this episode invites you to step down into your memory, pick up the pen, and let it out in a way that changes you.

Because sometimes, the real breakthrough comes when no one else is watching.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

ever been lost in your thoughts? Randomness? A thought pops into your head and you don't know where it came from. Many times it's your past. Things that have happened that have not let you go. Why have they hung on? Let's talk about that. Hi, I'm the Timesmith, and welcome back. I hope you had time to check the last lesson. Coping. Something stayed with me about that. Maybe the conversation needed to continue a little bit more. But I wanted to go down into memories again, as there was something I was taught when I was young. Recently, I was able to find a journal, but I wanted to talk about that journal. So, as usual, here we are in the forge. And remember, there's a counter in front of me. There's an elevator to the left and stairs to the right, and there's a couch in here. I usually use that for thinking. And yes, even though I say we should leave the forge at times, I do come back in here just to make sure that everything's right before I lock it up and face reality. But I want to go down in the memories. That's on the first floor, if you remember. So again, let's take the stairs. As we go down the stairs, you might hang on to the handrail. At times, I've ran my fingers through the walls as the walls have the texture of stones, cold stones. But here we are, the first subfloor. Memories. Let's walk down a few doors. And in this door, I was taught something about exercising. Exercising what exactly? Exercising the ability to voice what's inside of me. Whether by writing or talking to somebody that I trusted. In this case, it was just writing. So if you care to step in, In this memory, I was in fifth grade. My teacher had a habit of writing down on the chalkboard, what did you do this weekend? What did you eat this weekend? Did you do something fun? It was her way of engaging us, and we were able to pull out our journals and jot down our thoughts, turn them in, and she would reciprocate an answer. Well, I didn't entirely remember everything she asked, But the way I found this memory was actually when I was older. I was doing some cleaning in my garage and I had this box, a clear box, a storage container. And in that storage container were old journals from when I was a kid, report cards that I kept of my elementary years. And I decided to go through them to kind of remind myself where I had been and how well did I do. I did find that I talked a lot in elementary. There was a lot of needs improvement on sitting down and talking at a turn. But a pleasure to have in class. But in that search, I found a journal. And sadly, it had been waterlogged. And I separated the pages. But on one of the pages, it was clearly preserved. And the question was this. And here's the memory. What are your thoughts on abuse? That was the question my fifth grade teacher decided to ask us. Well, my answer was this. I think that those who have been abused hide it. They might want to try to live a normal life because it's painful. I said some more, and it's not entirely verbatim, but I'm paraphrasing. When my teacher would ask questions like, what did you eat? This weekend, I would say mac and cheese with chicken. I drank a root beer. Or she would ask, what's your favorite TV show and why? At that time, it was Knight Rider. I loved how Kit would just talk and take over. Before I was a car guy, I was a car kid. But on this question, I couldn't hide what was inside of me. Most journal entries were received with a smiley face, with a good answer. But on this one, She responded with, You're really knowledgeable about abuse. Hmm, I don't ever remember her asking me anything other than the question on the chalkboard. I don't remember her ever treating me special or separate from others. But I enjoyed being in her class. Let's step out for a second. When we talk about the trauma that's happened to us, and you find a friend who wants to hear about your problems, and you tell them that problem, At first, you tend to feel okay, being set free that you can finally tell somebody about what has happened. But then you might want to tell someone else, and that freeing feeling isn't the same. Well, you might go on to tell a third person, and a fourth person, and a fifth person. And I'll say this clearly, that right there is just venting. It's another form of coping. nothing really is happening in the sense that you are improving your quality of life temporarily maybe but not permanently it's not a very good route for the long-term healing writing is something a little more sacred than just telling somebody who wants to hear understandably there are people who listen and can help and i don't want to minimize that but what i am saying is The constant repetition of repeating the trauma in a form of venting doesn't do much. It actually causes you to latch on to people. It's a coping mechanism. When I look in this room and I see a young version of me in fifth grade grabbing that pencil, being able to share something, write it down and close that journal and put my pencil down. It's something that I still practice. At times there's things I want to say that I cannot even get out of my mouth. But I write them down. Writing things down. How does that help? Why don't we visit another room? In this memory, I'm 16 years old. And I had just gotten home from a youth group. And something happened there that really spurred me on that I wanted to write. And when I got home, I kind of just walked past my mom. She said, is everything okay? I said, yes, I just need to go write something. So let's walk in that room. I was in my bedroom. I had bunk beds. My older brother slept on the bottom. He wasn't always there. So sometimes I would sleep on top and other times I would sleep on the bottom. But I sat on the bottom bunk as I reached for a piece of paper on a desk that sat next to the bed. And on that desk was a radio cassette player, the type that has two cassette players on them. And I grabbed a piece of paper with the folder and put it on my lap and I began to write. I began to write how I felt, how broken I felt. There was times that I would look at teenagers and I would see them happy, well put together. I really couldn't see outside of my problem. Well, the content of that letter was something that I hid from everyone. Still, I wrote it down. Consisting of pain and suffering. How at times I want to cry and how at times I want to hurt myself. I want to hurt others. As they say, hurt people. Hurt people. The pattern continues. And I didn't want to do that. In fact, I didn't want to do that any longer. So I wrote the letter down All those thoughts in that letter. And I held it in my hand. And I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know who to send it to. I didn't know where to mail it to. But I proceeded to walk outside and it was already kind of late. It was dark outside. And behind our house, there was a desert. A large field. So as I walked down the street and around the block to reach the desert... I walked up to a dirt jump and I sat on the top of it. The sky was clear and I just looked up and said, I'm not sure if you're listening and if anyone's listening, but I wrote something for you. And I left it on that jump. And I walked back home. I didn't put my name on it. Didn't address it to anybody. I just wrote words. And I went back home. Let's walk out of that memory. Here we have two memories. almost five years apart. And it consisted of an exercise. An exercise that allowed me to do something more than just cope. It allowed me to put it down and say the things that I couldn't speak to anybody. It allowed me to open myself up in thought, in prayer, in thinking. I didn't entirely know how beneficial this would be to my life to just begin to write. In fact, it's because I write that it allows me to speak the way I do. At times I would become tongue-tied and not be able to format a sentence. Again, going back to feeling stupid and dumb. But I kept writing over and over. I don't want to feel like this anymore. I want to be healed. Can I please be normal? Can you take away this pain? And can you take away this suffering? My response when I was 16 was a whole lot different when I was in 5th grade. In fifth grade, I would write things like that and just go on about my business as the suffering wasn't always ailing me. It would rear its ugly head, but as I got older, it wasn't just rearing its head, it was coming alive in me. The anger was solidifying itself in my life. The emptiness was filling my life. The rejection and the abandonment, it was consuming me. And I wanted it to end. So, If it is just venting, nothing's happening. But if you're exercising, you can create the change. Why don't we start walking away from these rooms because what this was today was more just about me sharing about the exercises that we can do, the exercises that changed my life, of when it had to come out. I didn't always feel that I could trust somebody enough to tell them. Even now, I don't always want to tell everyone. This podcast here is vulnerability for the sake of growth, for the sake of sharing and the potential of your own healing. Please keep in mind that I've lived these steps and there were many days of silence. There was many days of isolation and not just loneliness, a personal rejection of my own self, not wanting to fit in, not feeling special, but thriving and wanting to be An outcast. But I had to come back to reality. And I had to see that there was people around me that wanted to care about me. That wanted to see me okay. That it wasn't just the questions of what's wrong with you. It wasn't just the questions of what happened. The identification of something that happened in my life. And those that saw something is wrong with you. Well... When I ended up alone, I would just grab a piece of paper and I would answer their questions to myself. Sometimes I would just tear that paper up that no one can see. So I'm not sure exactly how you're going to play this one out, but I will admit to you that that paper began to free me. The things I wrote, those words I jotted down were beginning to bring me life and a life that I never knew. And at times it felt safer just to live in my anger and my rejection and my isolation. Because being accepted was new to me, including accepting my own brokenness. Let's walk up and out. Can I ask you something? How do you exit your own head? Maybe you're not even in your head. Maybe you just listen because it's interesting. But for those who remain in their head, What exactly do you do? Have you come out and accept the reality that your life can be fractured and broken? That there's situations and matters that have happened that you might be too embarrassed to talk about? Ashamed? It's humiliating? I nod my head as I say the word humiliation. That has overshadowed most of my life. But I've written that down. And I can talk about it. And yes, at times I look at myself in reality and I just tell myself, it's all right. It's okay. So if you haven't heard that in a while, let me remind you. Write that down. It's okay. It's fine. I'm not alone. So it's not just coping. It's doing things that actually change a life. And this is just one of them. So you might write a letter to a person that hurt you and they might not ever see that letter. You might write it to God and throw it into the wind. You might throw it in the trash. You might burn it up. But don't just tell it to somebody who's just wanting to hear your business. Write it down so that your life can change. So remember, if you feel lost, you can be found. If you feel unloved, You are loved. Now is the time to change. Have a great day. I am the Timesmith.