Recently, I was asked where I feel safe. I was taken back and couldn’t answer immediately. No one asks stuff like that anymore. Take a moment and really think about that. Where do you feel safe? Try and answer that. You can’t without putting some serious thought into it, because we aren’t asked things and we don’t ask others things like that anymore.

We as a society associate safety with others. As children, we hid behind our mother’s dresses or skirts or legs, because she made us feel safe. We hid behind dad in whatever way we can, because as children he made us feel safe. They’re our parents, their jobs were to protect us no matter what.

As we grow older, we begin to drift away from our parents and become more of individuals. In college, we could go back home and eat dinner with our parents or we could call them and ask their advice, but does that make us feel safe? For someone that’s hundreds of miles away from mom and dad, where can I seriously feel safe? All of these thoughts ran through my head in a matter of thirty seconds, and I was stuck. I couldn’t figure out where I feel safe. Holy shit… What does that say about me? I thought.

Especially in college, we tend to never feel safe. Yes, we have university police officers all around campus. We even have those big blue towers that are within seeing distance of another one that sends an alert to an authoritative figure in case of an emergency. But that doesn’t make me feel safe. That creepy guy that watches me walk down the street after a night in the library. That group of young adult men leaving the bar as I pass them on the busy street. The never-ending chain of possibilities are terrifying, but as college students, that’s what we signed up for. We picked these schools, knowing the potential level of danger. So, then where am I safe? If I can’t be at home with mom and dad, where can I be to feel safe?

Simply defined, safety is the condition of being safe from undergoing or causing hurt, injury, or loss. Check Webster’s for that. We never really think about what it really means to be safe. Like most things in life, it means something different to everyone.

And then it hit me. I’m safe when I’m in my own skin. My skin, my heart, my body. I’m safe when I’m me. Recently, I’ve been feeling safer and safer the more I write. I get my feelings out on to paper and I feel safe, I feel at home. Give me my journal, a pencil, some music to match my feelings and I’m ready-to-go. And now I can’t stop thinking about it, about where I feel safe. I wrote about it three times, this article makes four.

Writing is my favorite way, no, my only way to get away from danger. I could be feeling the most at risk of danger, when I pull out my journal, I’m safe. I tune out the world, get all of my worries out onto paper. At home. At ease. Free of anxiety and worry. As I’ve grown older (yes, I’m only 20, but I’ve learned a lot since being a young 16 year old) I’ve been able to write about anything and have it be therapeutic. I write about the color orange, because I hate orange. I write about my stresses of my daily life through an artistic lens. No one reads the pieces, poems, or stories… but me. I write to get it out. I go back days, weeks, months later and I see how far I’ve come, how much I’ve learned and what I’ve experienced. They always say that you can never forget your past, rather always remembering it helps you grow as a person. And that’s what I’m doing. I write to grow, I write to be safe, I write to be me.

Shout out to my journal: my number one listener.