why I write

As I sit here contemplating what to write, my mind goes to why I am writing. When I was a young girl I would write in a journal, but for some reason stopped. My memories of my early writing are littered with the experiences that may have turned me off to putting my thoughts down on paper. There were the countless times where my mother read my journal and sat me down to talk about my very private thoughts, a violation of the highest level to any youngster, although now as a mother myself I have more sympathy for why she would do that. There was the time I left my journal under the desk in my social studies class as a junior in high school. Typically, my journal back then was full of the dreams and agonies that my teen years were full of. My horror was only exceeded by my embarrassment when one of my friends brought the journal to me, sternly telling me “You really should keep track of where you leave this, people were reading it.” At that time the ramblings were about my crush on the popular football player at our school, “Chad”, and I was sure the story circled around to him to my dismay. For the next year and a half until graduation I avoided any possible contact with him or anyone in his group, dropping my eyes if we passed in the hall and doing my best to become invisible.

But here I am, doing it again, putting my thoughts down, but this time in an intentionally public way. Why? It has become clear to me that I really love to write. And I am proud of my journey, the mistakes and all. The how I write means more I think at this moment than why. When I committed to writing every day, I did not think about “well what if I have nothing to write?” There have been days where I sit here in my writing space and need to quiet my mind to hear my thoughts, if that makes sense. Much of the time, though, I wake up with words jumbling in my mind and need to force myself to first let the dogs out and start the coffee brewing before sitting down to get it out. When I write it is like my mind is turned off, the words flow through me and into my fingers The writing is littered with misspelled words, usually transposed i and e or for some reason I exchange the c’s for x’s. I let it all flow out for as long as it needs to, then I pause and read over what I have written.

The process tells me that I am doing what I should be doing. The inspiration and words are coming from deep inside me, or from somewhere else, I am not sure. It is the same when you are involved in any project where you are in the flow, things are moving seemingly perfectly in sync and you lose track of time. I would like to think that we all have times when this is what we experience, and if we don’t something needs to change. When we are in the flow, or the zone, and what we do doesn’t seem like work, that is the juice. That is when the universe conspires to help us, and the right people or ideas or resources show up a the exact moment that you need them. I have been here many times in my life, but it is only now in retrospect that I can see it. It has meant becoming more aware of who I really am, and unapologetically being that person. Not some image of who I think I should be, but me.