We, as human beings, too often encounter things we wish we hadn’t. It’s just a fact of life. You know it. I know it. The guy that sits on the park bench you walk by every morning knows it. These things can consist of a number of things. It could be a disagreement with a friend, that one time you wore the same sweater as Becky from your 7th grade biology class, or a mistake you’ve made in the past. We want to forget about so many things, it’s hard to count them all. What sucks is that these things come back into our brains at the worst times. For me, it’s usually when I’m trying really hard to fall asleep. What we do in the presence of these things is so unhealthy for us as people: we suppress it.
So I write. I write to forget about those things because trying to forget about it on my own doesn’t seem to ever work. If anyone finds a way to forget about something without an external aid, let me know because I haven’t been able to find a way yet. But that’s the beauty of being a writer. I can take that embarrassing moment from 7th grade that I can’t seem to forget about, write a piece about it or relating to it or whatever, and leave my memory of it on the paper. It doesn’t have to be long, it could be as short as a tiny poem for all I care. All that matters to me is that I’m getting my feelings out, getting my bad memories out, and leaving it out.
And most of you right now are thinking that I keep a diary and write my feelings in there, because that’s your preconceived notion of what it means to write for a therapeutic purpose. But you are so, so wrong. I’ll write about my fears through verbs only. I’ll write about how much I hate the color orange (but only bright orange, burnt orange is gorgeous) by naming things that are orange that I hate solely because they’re that shade of orange. I’ll write a poem that makes no sense to anyone but me. That’s the true beauty of writing. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but me. Because in a week, month, year, when I go back to look at what I’ve written, I’m going to be taken back to that moment when I finally was able to get it all out.
Who knows, maybe one day those little writings I’ve completely forgotten about will turn into a book.
