Visual Words

I first learned about Wordle from a post last month by fragmentz. The other day Castorgirl made the post "Lost for Words". They both got me motivated!

I am a firm believer that diversified means of expression are necessary for healing, especially for those of us who struggle with dissociative problems. But, one could easily argue that this is important for any person to live a healthy life! Being able to express ourselves in different ways helps us be more flexible, encourages creativity, and just plain makes us more interesting people.

The connection to dissociative problems is particularly important. Through dissociation, we become accustomed to having parts of us handle very specific areas of life in mostly extremely rigid ways. If you look at such a person as a whole, one would most likely see all the variety that person possesses, and rigidity would probably not be the word that would come to mind to describe the whole person. Instead, the most common phrase I hear is "remarkably adaptive". That's little comfort most times to the person who routinely dissociates. The experience for someone who routinely dissociates in more extreme ways is usually one of fragmentation, lost time, and discontinuity.

The prognosis for dissociative disorders is good, I think, because we already have within us the necessary components to live interesting and creative lives most everyone strives for. I am not meaning to trivialize the process of healing or the struggles we face, but healing really is within our grasp and the destination is, I think, a wonderful place to end up and the journey itself isn't that bad either.

Art therapy, some aspects of my photography, piano, writing, and poetry have been very helpful in my healing. They have all provided ways to bridge what I know intellectually in my brain with what I feel in my heart. In many ways, through these means, I've been able to create a sort of glue that holds all the pieces of me together.

Wordle is very easy to use. In the simplest way, you can just enter a list of words in a form, and it will create a visual representation for you. More advanced uses allow the ability to weight the sizes of particular words and assign colors. From there, you can use the menus to decide how you want the software to lay out the words. You don't have strict control over word placement. But you can fiddle with the settings and create as many variations as you want.

I suggest to make screen captures as you go along because the software doesn't have a history function. Further I suggest you keep your list of words (and size and color tags if you use them) in a text editor. Then if you want to change anything, just change it in the text editor and paste that into the form.

What does what I created mean? The short answer is that these are the words taken from my "Contract" that have particular meaning to me. I weighted "Balance" the most, and that and "truth" are the only words in white. The pink words are kind of in the same class as balance. Grounding words are green. Nouns are in blue. Action oriented things I have to do to heal are in red. "God" is in purple.

To create your own, head on over to: Wordle.

For something similar, yet different, check out Tagul. It gives more control than Wordle, but many of the things it does you can do in a text editor with a little script control. But it's worth checking out.

Finally, if you are interested in words, see Visuwords, an online graphical dictionary and thesaurus.

If you click on the image above, you will see a higher resolution image.