Pen to Paper

I used to write songs. I used to sing at the top of my lungs hoping that some rando would hear me and tell me that I needed a job in Hollywood. I practiced my facial expressions in the mirrors. I would play every part in my make believe narrative. I was a one woman show with a fake audience to dazzle. And since I was also the fake audience, I got a standing ovation every single time. 

As my voice grew to be scratchier, and my songs dwindled. I threw away my notebooks that beheld everything from fully thought out songs, to stories I thought I would someday tell my kids. I burned a couple of them ceremoniously. I watched each page of my young teenage years fall into the fire. Those journals held parts of me that I could, couldn’t, and sometimes didn’t want to understand.

I remember the day I filled a trash bag with all my journals. Each spine was cracked a number of times. The evidence of a well used journal. And isn’t that the life goal of a journal; to be so used that you are broken from the outside. So full of memories that it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. 

Some of the things that I had written about I don't even remember, I think that's a good thing though. There was one notebook that I wrote in every night. Its pages were filled to the brim with the mundane and dramatic. You never knew which day you would flip too. One entry my handwriting would be so neat you’d think I traced over a pencil. Then the next entry would be the worst chicken scratch you'd ever seen. 

I said things that I could never say out loud. Things about my friends and family that I prayed would never see the light of day. And I kept this journal for over 2 years. It just slowly ate away at my kindness. A catalog of every wrong doing that someone had done to me. There were good things in this journal too. The day I got my first car, when I met my best friend, how I met my first camp crush. All the emotional things that I would have loved to tell my children one day. But the bad outweighed the good. And if those entries made it out into the world, I don’t think anyone would understand the fact that the mean things I said were a way to vent, not how I truly felt.

I think back to that time in my life. When everything someone did I would just think This is definitely going in my journal. I was actively seeking out things to write about. I created stories in my head of what people were doing to “add to my journal” . I searched for the negative to make my written down life more interesting.

I used to genuinely believe that some researcher in a thousand years would find my journal in the middle of Texas and think, “man, this girl had an insane life.” He would write a book called In the Mind of a Teenage Girl.  My words would sell out immediately because these people would want to read my “diary.” So I wasn’t even writing for my future children, I was writing for a future generation. I legit believed that I would be in the history books. 

I guess no matter how old I got I was still playing make believe in front of a fake audience, hoping for a standing ovation from a world that didn’t exist yet. 

I don't journal anymore. I haven't journaled in 2 years. I keep those emotions to myself. I pray and I move on. But I don't ever write the emotions down. For some people, journaling is a good way to express themselves. For me, it’s the start of my downfall. The start of seeing red. Once I start to write down the things I think about, it feels like they are etched in stone. It’s no longer just a thought, it’s a belief. 

With Love,

Pixie Rain