Everyone has different uses for writing. Some use it to channel their creativity, some use it as a means of making money and some, like me, use it to vent. I always had writing assignments in school but none of them really had an impact on my life until the summer before junior year in high school. That summer was a terrible summer for me. Nothing went the way I had hoped and I was unhappy. My boyfriend and I broke up the night before my last exam. I would talk to my friends about it but I felt like it became too much for them. I knew they wanted to make me happy so they would listen but I didn’t feel right about putting them through it so I started writing. Whenever I needed a break from everyone around me, I would grab a piece of paper and a pen and just start pouring my thoughts onto paper. It was usually about how I was going through a tough time, which now seems increasingly petty, but at that time paper was my confidant. I wrote everything, even if it was a paragraph, or even barely a line. I used to transfer all the bad thoughts in my mind onto paper and just leave it there. I substituted my friends for paper. Paper wouldn’t talk back or tell me that it wasn’t god for me. It would just listen, absorb, and always be there. And that’s when I fell in love with writing.
This is when writing became a habit. When I got over irrelevant boyfriend issues, I still had that craving to write something, anything, so I started writing about my day. If I had had a bad day, I would sit with my book and pen and just write till I overcame the bad thoughts. Those rare but sweet moments when I would go into a stream of consciousness showed me glimpses of certain peculiarities I didn’t even know I possessed. Sometimes I would re read things that I had written previously and I would be able to feel what I had felt when I was writing those words. All those memories would come rushing back. This is a feeling I didn’t want. This is the feeling I got rid of by writing. And so, I transformed my bad thoughts into happy thoughts. I thought that if years later I want to read about my life, why would I want to read everything bad that happened? Why wouldn’t I let those memories be forgotten memories of the past? At the time I thought it made me a happier person but I realized later that all it did was store those unhappy thoughts in a different place in the world. They were outside my head but still there. That’s when I decided to let go.
Happy thoughts filled my pages. After an exhausting day I would sit in the comfort of my room and open up to any page just to read how happy I was. And if I weren’t happy at that moment, I would strive to be as happy as my words. I would write lyrics and quotes. They took me back to great days full of great conversations. Some lyrics would take me back to a day at the park. The feeling you get when you’re sitting on a swing and looking up into the sky. The nauseating, but at the same time blissful feeling I would get when the swing would go backwards, right before I could catch the star in the sky. Although all the pages I had written made me realize what I didn’t want to be when I read them, they also made me realize that I could feel the pain of, say, a random day in October. I had decided to let the past be the past and to write about the happy moments in life. Years later, those are the ones that I would want to remember.
Like I said before, everyone has different uses of writing. My writing is personal, it made me realize the kind of person I am, the kind of person I don’t want to be and it made me remember that Sunday last year when it rained on a hot day and I sat in the sunroom watching the rain and writing.