I was in high school. The drama was in full swing.
I loved every minute of it.
If you read my journal, a shiny pink little number with flowers on it, you could see how much energy I dedicated to social circles and nervous comparisons around body shape, hair height and jean tightness by the vast gaps between entries. This seems reasonable. I was a Long Island teen, running around leaving rings of shiny lip gloss around the rims of wine cooler bottles in beach parking lots. Who had time to write? Boundaries were decades in my future, and I was a pleaser of all the people all the time. My Catholic upbringing had taught me that fear and respect were indistinguishable around adults, my low self-esteem kept me jumpy and witty, cute and charming around the boys, endearingly intimidated by the girls. I was a constant dance of smiles, wisecracks, open invitations to every party and every relationship. I would bend opinions around acceptance, love, and validation. And it took its toll on my creative energy. But at sixteen you could not have held my attention long enough to explain this to me.
I had been writing since I was six years old, for reasons I never understood, but by my teen years I did so sporadically and mostly it was venting. Usually about angry injustices I would carve into the paper, an early curfew or a denied keg party. But, it did its job, offering distance between me and the words, making me an observer...they never understand me...I hate it here...slowing me down as I was forced to articulate my racing mind and catapulting emotions.
This was no small feat. It was clear that I was exceptionally complicated as evidenced by the poetry I wrote, but, you know what, let's forget I mentioned the poetry. I'm getting off track. The part that makes it apparent that I'm complicated is that occasionally I would write a few pages in a stream of consciousness until my brain ran dry, and once in a while some things would sneak out, real things. Mostly it was about boys, how they looked at me, parties we went to, things at school, teachers that sucked, and getting in trouble. And then once in a while something true would get in, a glimpse of the depression that crept along the bottom of my stomach I pretended not to feel, or some words about the utter exhaustion around the masks I had to wear. I wish when I was crying in my room someone would come and ask me what's wrong or give me a hug. It would be something I would never say, something I wouldn't even write, just a thing that slipped out because my brain had relaxed enough to forget I was supposed to hold it in. And then it would be right back to complaining about how my locker always got stuck or my mother caught me smoking. And I would go until I ran out of thoughts. And you could tell when I was done because it ended abruptly in the middle of the page or with an apology about it.
But I always liked the way it felt afterwards, like I had gotten empty and swept my brain clean.
When you flip through my journal from high school, you can see how very brief and momentary everything is. Just one thing to another, one feeling, one moment, one day, one party, one cute boy, one bad haircut, one pair of jeans. At the time, close up, it's all very important and precious, sometimes it's angry and heavily drawn onto the page and sometimes there are so many lines written the paper is covered. But then you see it's just one leaf of many. And another and another.
But at sixteen, there was only that one page, that one haircut, that one cute boy. And those true words were kept hidden because the feelings behind them were too big for me to see. But now I have a lot of pages, a lot of books, a lot of times I didn't write for reasons I can choose to understand, words I can see or not see.
And you can write to track your creative energy, to reveal and confront, or not, to wash your mind with stream of consciousness, and to vent. And to write terrible poetry. Am I the only one writing terrible poetry?
Creative practice is more than writing, more than painting. It offers ways to see. And whenever you started it - high school, summer vacation, those ten times you said "I'm totally going to use that journal I bought," or five minutes ago - you started the story of your energy, your questions, your boundaries, your frustrations, and your tolerance for revelation. What is your story? Do you look back on it? If your practice isn't a cool pink journal with flowers, do you see meaning when your bowling team dwindles and Tuesdays become lonely stretches you attribute to "busy" and nothing more? Is it more? The shine of our lip gloss can be a distraction. Looks great though, I'll give you that.