I used to write these silly little blogposts. Not for any purpose or audience, but as the written equivalent of singing in the shower: just to hear something emerge from my heart, reverberate off the walls, and bounce back into my mind.
Then, I stopped writing them.
These little musings didn’t get marked for any of my High School English classes, they didn’t fit into my creative writing curriculums in university, and they weren’t fact-based enough for the newspaper. I couldn’t compete with them at a poetry slam and I couldn’t present them in school workshops. So I wrote other things that other people asked me to write, and left them in the little shoebox of my mind for a later date.
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Have you ever been walking around the bedroom of your mind and accidentally kicked a mental shoebox that was hiding under your bed? Have you ever brushed off the dust and smiled as you looked at the sepia tone pictures? That moment happened to me one day as I clicked the wrong folder on Google Drive and found myself in a thread of blogposts I had written once upon a time.
These were, in large part, the contemplations of a teenage girl, without any credibility to her name. I was not quoting reliable sources or commenting on current events, and the only fact-checking was done from my own limited life experience.
But there was something so urgent to me about writing them, something that nudged its way between my real assignments and real life, that made them feel precious.
I have found that when I do things for no apparent reason, it is generally for a very important, unapparent reason. And of course, this is what I found with my blogposts.
The deeper I delved into my writing, the more I discovered about myself. The more I discovered about who I wanted to be. And on top of all that, there was always this little voice in the back of my mind whispering: someone else must feel the same way, too.
So here I am. 28 years old, a solid decade after my uninvited blogposts started, and still an inexperienced liver in the grand scheme of things.
Now, on behalf of a much younger and unconfident me, I'm dumping this shoe box out on the kitchen table for everyone to see.
I am not promising you life-changing epiphanies. I’m not even promising that you’ll like it. All I am promising is to put myself earnestly out there. And by doing so, perhaps you’ll find a grain of your own lives in my writing, and you just might discover something with me.
So here it goes. To opened shoe boxes. To bravery. To sharing in the human experience. And to that 15-year-old me, hunched over her journal, hoping to be a writer someday.