Ever sit at your keyboard and have the experience that some amazing insights and ideas are percolating in your mind... and then you almost immediately think to yourself "nobody is going to give a rat's rear end about that!"
What's inside a deep purple poppy?
When I was a teenager — and just starting to come into my own skin as a writer, for the first time — the thing that mostly held me back was the fact that I would get enormously enthusiastic about something that truly moved me, but moments later the realization would set in that the majority almost everyone around me experienced being alive through a completely different lens of perception than I did.
It's entirely possible that the most pressing reason I never went on to formally become "a writer" was that I was too far off the map for folks to actually understand what I was talking about.
And so, I instead chose to write for myself, going through endless journals filled with my tiny writing, using the words that flowed onto the page as a sort of catharsis and counselor, all rolled into one.
Flowering grass and tiny webs...
And goodness knows, I needed to "sort things out" because the insight — at age 14 — that I may just be from another planet was unsettling, to say the least.
I wasn't a rebellious teenager, but evidently a slightly scary one who would — in all sincerity — go you my mother and very earnestly ask "Mom, are you entirely SURE I am actually human, and not something else?"
Of course, my mother was disturbed by this, but not for the obvious reason you might think. In her case, the "disturbance" came from the thought that it didn't fit her self-image to have to explain/justify to her country club friends that her son might be a little... "off."
She needn't have feared. I was very good at keeping to myself, so nobody much got to experience the "weirdo" living at our house.
Summer mountains
Years later — decades, actually — I came to realize that my early blaming my mother for not putting me in a life situation where I actually could experience being a teenager with my peers was somewhat unfounded, because I would never have been any kind of "normal teenager" even if I had been given the perfect environment for that experience.
In truth, being a teenager coming of age among primarily retired people might actually have been the best thing that could have happened to me, as I was seemingly devoid of the sort of "wild side" I saw in my Danish cousins when I went back to Denmark for holidays, or among my few friends of similar age to myself.
Sometimes it takes a person a long time to realize that a situation — no matter how messed up it might have been — actually offered the best potential outcome under the circumstances at hand.
Purple clover
All in all, I filled 14 — or maybe it was 16 — of the red 500-page journals I could save up for and buy from the local stationers in our local town in Spain.
Years later I discovered that my local Barnes & Noble in Austin, Texas actually carried that same brand of journal books — made in Spain, and everything — and I took it as a sign to resume writing personally as a way to work through my thoughts and my challenges in life.
Those original journals unfortunately don't exist anymore... as I burned them all after discovering that my mother had been looking at them, and wanted to "have a talk" with me.
Not because she was concerned, as such, but because she felt the need to "correct" how I felt about myself, and my life... because it did not suit her to be "cast" as anything but the perfect — albeit longsuffering — parent.
And so, some 7,000 pages of handwritten experiences went up in smoke on our BBQ grill...
Pom-pom marigolds
I continue to hand write in paper journals, although I am not nearly as prolific as I once was. Life keeps me too busy to sit around and pour my heart and soul out onto paper for several hours a day.
With a slightly wry smile I also realize that even if I did who would ever care?
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!
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Created at 2024-04-06 02:12 PDT
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What a pity your mother found your journals and was reading them, leading up to you destroying them.
Many I knew growing up kept daily diary that someone in the home would find and intrusively read through your innermost thoughts, not sure how I would have reacted!
Being a in habit of writing gives a semblance of being able to return, see how one has managed to overcome unusual events in life.
I had a similar experience at about 13 years old, entering my bedroom to find my father standing there flicking through the pages of my diary and having a good laugh, for on each page were only two or three words...mother drunk, father drunk or mother and father drunk. I have not kept a diary since.