Almost mid-way through my sophomore year, I just lost writing. I felt no want or even a need to write and the work that I was producing I didn’t care about. Having lost this practically innate feeling that had always been a part of me was strange and I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong. Can there be a wrong way of writing?
At this time, in our creative writing class our teacher, Ms. Bundy, had us studying Magical Realism, which I didn’t really like anyways, so I blamed my not-so-enthusiastic attitude towards writing on the fact that I just couldn’t write Magical Realism. It was denial in its finest form. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to write, but that I just couldn’t. Or this is what I told myself.
At this time, my life was the epitome of a teenage movie. I bathed in my teen angst. Writing seemed trivial in comparison to everything else happening because it seemed like everything was happening to me and I had no way to stop any of it. In the spare time I could wedge into my day, I used to write. I carried my journal with me everywhere I went. And now, my journal laid haphazardly in the space between my desk and my bed, mocking me, so I hid it underneath schoolwork and that was my new excuse; I was too busy with school to write more than I already had to.
I kept coming up with different excuses to defend the fact that I just could not stand writing. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. Writing became a chore. I watched episodes Criminal Minds, instead of revising a story or a poem, and I saw no problem in this. I went on like this through a good portion of the second quarter because it was fine. Ms. Bundy didn’t comment on how my pieces were lackluster or the fact that my notes turned into chicken scratch.
It wasn’t really until winter break when I realized how much I missed the act of writing. I missed having the drive to want to sit down and write anything whether it be amazing or absolutely horrendous. Winter break meant that I had an excessive amount of time on my hands. With winter break came a tsunami of various emotions, ranging from joy to desperation to anger. I felt heavy from everything I wasn’t writing.
So, I forced myself to journal. Every day, I made myself sit down and write. It didn’t matter what I wrote as long as I was writing. Honestly, it was a chore and I loathed it, but I still did it. I still sat down with my journal and wrote. Slowly, it began to feel familiar, less mechanical. I felt light again. I had to learn how to love writing again.
Winter break ended and I worried that I would fall into the same habit of creating excuses to not write and slide back into the same funk I was in. I refused to make writing my New Year’s resolution because no one ever commits to those and I needed to commit to writing. Making time for writing is hard and I don’t write every single day and I wish I could say that I did, but that’s not how it is. For me, writing is a way to take a weight off of myself and put it onto paper. If I could weigh my journal, it would weigh 2000 pounds.
There are nights where I choose writing over sleeping because I know I cannot carry that weight anymore, which is okay. Writing is a matter of making life easier because that is the only way I know how to.
-Winnie Blay, Junior Managing Editor/Submissions
Comments