Words and Catharsis and Stuff Like That.

Hi, I'm back.

I mean, no big deal its only been like six months, and wow, I've missed my words.

I've been writing a lot---I mean, I am at college and that's kind of what you do on an all-too-regular basis. But I haven't written for me in a long time. Like, I haven't written about stars and books and best friends and adventures and lessons in spontaneity in way too long. And also, my roommates thought that it was spontenUity, not spontanEity, I mean, awkward right? Good thing I'm working on expanding my vernacular, so that I can teach them correct verbiage :)

Also. How weird is it that I just used "roommates" in a sentence, because now I actually have roommates instead of brothers? I mean, I've been living with them since September but it still kind of blows me away when I think about it, and how they've kind of become my family away from my family away from family and how we get along and how we all just love each other. It's amazing how the unknown just kind of works itself out.

All day today I've just felt this desire to get my hands on a piece of paper and a pen and just let everything flow. I guess that my keyboard works just as well, but its funny how you have all of these thoughts that are flying around inside of your head, but as soon as you try to catch one and analyze it and write about it, the thought flits just out of reach, always remaining tantalizingly close but never close enough to touch.

So now I'm here, writing and babbling and enjoying the sounds of the keys clacking and my thoughts humming and the sight of black marks on a bright screen, because it is cleansing and cathartic and beautiful, and the longer I sit here the more I realize that I've missed it. Not only have I missed it, but I've needed it.

My writing professor loves to tell us that writing is thinking.

"I write entirely to find out what is on my mind, what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I'm seeing, and what it means." 

- Joan Didion

So does that mean I haven't been thinking for the last six months? Most definitely not. I just haven't been synthesizing my thoughts or recording them as well as I could have. But then I had this epiphany, mostly because I read this quote: 

"The writers who get my personal award are the ones who show exceptional promise of looking at their lives in this world as candidly and searchingly and feelingly as they know how and then telling the rest of us what they have found there most worth finding. We need the eyes of writers like that to see through." 

- Frederick Beuchner

I realized that maybe I don't have the most beautiful words in the world, and maybe I don't have the most exciting adventures in the world, but I am the only person who will see the world through an Ashley-colored-lens, and I am the only person who will write about the world from an Ashley-point-of-view, so regardless of if I feel like I have something special to say, I do, and regardless of anyone else cares, I care, and regardless of if anyone else reads it, I read it. And by writing and reading and writing some more, I figure out what I really think and how I really feel and what I really see in the world. 

So basically, I think I'll start writing again, and not just writing, but writing for fun, writing for me. Will I be consistent? I'd like to say yes, but probably not. Will it all be beautiful and poetic and filled with rhetorical devices? Definitely not. But that's ok, because it will be writing and it will be mine, and for now, that is good enough.