Writing Again

It's not normal to get up at seven and be overcome with a desire to write. It's not normal to read a textbook and be so inspired that the tips of my fingers tingle. My stomach does a flip, and I begin to whisper ideas. And it's only seven in the morning. And I'm in the middle of reading a TEXTBOOK.

My thoughts flow best from a pen. Perhaps it's the years of in-class essay training for AP tests... my fingers grip the thin pen, my wrist flicks and my mind starts spewing ideas while my hand tries to keep up. Perhaps it's the ten years of journaling... Thirteen notebooks filled with the worries of a ten year old overshadowed by the prayers of a college student. When thoughts, emotions, anger, and joy come so fast the hand cramps, the ink stops marking, or the handwriting droops off the evenly measured lines.

Writing used to be my obsession. I would announce that I was going upstairs to write, and that I was not to be disturbed. I wrote story after story: of my friendly wolves in the backyard, the time tornado, adventures on horseback, and my unfinished fantasy story: "The Basement." Reading over these old "manuscripts" written in my large, 8-year old handwriting usually leads to hilarity: laughing at myself for the way I spelled words, the silly ideas, my obsession with animals.

Somewhere in the process of growing up, I lost it. I lost the joy in writing. My writings were nothing more to me than a joke. There was nothing interesting there... only fantasy governed by childish imagination, or copies off of my favorite books. Nonfiction research papers soon took up the rest of my writing life... and any desire to write deeply meaningful things was dimmed by the memories of foolish childhood scribbles. Anything even slightly meaningful was recorded in one of my thirteen journals.... never to be read by anyone...except once by a nosy brother, which was very close to the end of the world.... and me.

After years of writing and feeling like I have nothing to say... I gave up. I stopped writing my fantasy. I stopped writing real. I stopped writing for people.

And then I read this textbook about teaching kids to write. And all the emotions of writing come flooding back. My fingers tingle. I reach for a pen. In the middle of reading about poetry I stand up, march over to where I keep my precious (fourteenth?) journal and begin to draft poems about things that have been consuming my mind. And there on those pages, months of emotion are poured out in a metaphor. And the anxious, gnawing thoughts ebb away... recorded on that paper... no longer in my mind.

Slowly, I have come to discover that one of the most freeing feelings lies in picking up the pen again... in grasping it... in laying it firmly against my writing callus, and letting the ink make marks on the page. And once the scrambled emotions are unleashed, to let someone else in... to share the thoughts...and to listen to feedback.