Writing: A Peace of Mind

When I was younger, I honestly couldn't stand writing. It was a pain in the butt. When the teacher asked us to write I thought that I was going to go crazy. I really didn't understand why so many people wrote. There were so many books and I didn't like reading either. I just thought that people used too many words to say something so simple. To me, even Dr. Seuss books had too many words.

As I got a little older I started writing more than I thought I ever would. I grew up around the time when AOL became a hit. The most popular thing had to be chat rooms. Do you guys remember that? I remember so many people (I won't list any names) trying to find their soul mates through chat rooms. It obviously got a little creepy sometimes when you received a "a/s/l" (which stood for "age, sex, location") from a girl that said she could be at your house in an instant with "Titanic" so the both of you could watch together. I'm of course not speaking from experience. I wrote notes in High School so that I could convince a girl that I was "amazing". They wrote back to let me know that I wasn't.

When I was a freshman at Andrews University I took an English class and our teacher forced us to do reflective writing. I believe that class made me despise writing even more. She made us write about how we felt that day. I had no interest in doing that, but I figured it wasn't that bad. Just when I thought she did her worst, she surprised me. She would then ask me to write how I felt while I was writing how I felt. Are you kidding me? I lost it. I couldn't believe that a sane person would ask anybody to do such a thing. I wasn't the only that thought this, there were a number of students in my class that shared the same sentiment. I then told myself writing was foolish.


What I didn't realize is the fact that writing isn't foolish at all. Especially when you're writing about something you care about. When you have the opportunity to write about something that you care for, the words don't stop flowing on the paper. It's a whole lot easier to do that then to write about the boring concert your faculty expected you to "reflect" on. Even now I find myself having to cut my writing short because it seems to be too long.

As I've gotten older, I've grown a deep appreciation for words. I began to like writing more and more because it helped me to express myself. I learned how to get my feelings out. I'm not sure about the rest of you, but it really does give me peace. A friend of mine told me that when he writes, it's like therapy. I think I'll have to agree with that. Sometimes you need to get what's in your head on a piece of paper so that you could look at it and reflect on it. If you never write it down, you risk the chance of losing it; and if you lose something great, you'll just waste it. They say the brain is a terrible thing to waste, but I'll say this: what the brain PRODUCES is a terrible thing to waste.