Evergreen

I wonder sometimes, do trees that lose their leaves find themselves jealous of the evergreens that surround them. Or those who always have a coat to stay warm in the harsh midst of winter. While they themselves shiver, bare and naked while the snow clings to them, seeping coldly into their bark.

I imagine they’d be envious, waiting out the winter for eternity, with nothing to cling to except legends that one day, they’ll surely bloom. It would surely seem impossible, that they’d ever give birth to something so beautiful. So they wait and watch, cold barren and sickly. Desperately wishing to be an evergreen. Wanting so desprately to be someone else, that they themselves could never be.

They’re so consumed with what they aren’t, they may not even take recognize the foliage  that’s beginning to blossom on their branches. Or the ones who do, may compare themselves to the fir or the pine. Meanwhile on the other side, its the evergreens whine. Why can’t they see? No one takes notice of those who stay the same. Nor the one’s who lack the ability to spring to life a new season.

For, evergreens are ever green.

 

Smothering my creativity

I find myself longing for my youth very often. The simplicity. The lack of fear. The drive and passion to be whoever I wanted to be. I was very lucky to be exposed to creative outlets as a kid. I remember the smell of paint on the canvas in my kindergarten class. The day I first learned to mix red and white to get the color pink. It was one of the most amazing things I’d ever discovered. The fact that if you were lacking one color, you could just mix two together and create something new.

I remember sketching in the programs at church. Trying my very best to emulate my favorite cartoon characters on the page. Back then I didn’t care whether they turned out right or not. I just put my pencil to the paper, and drew whatever my mind sparked up.

It was the same with dancing, and singing too. There was an array of different creative avenues that drew me in. And at the time I never compared myself, or felt insecure about who was doing it better.

I just did.

I don’t know when that changed for me. When the insecurity came about. The jealousy. The feeling of being stuck, too afraid to do, or not to do. Too afraid of failing. It latched onto me, and it never let go. I put away the crayons. The paint. Stopped singing  and dancing in front of people out of fear that I wasn’t doing it right. It restricted me until I couldn’t move a muscle even if I tried. Until I couldn’t do anything at all. All of the flourishing imagination that was once apart of me, slowly faded away until I had barely anything left.

But there still is something there, although it’s hard to get too. When I’m by myself, I can’t help to sing aloud. Even if it’s bad. And dance to the music in my head. I trace the things in front of me with my fingers in the air. And I come back to places like this, just to get the words that dance around my mind onto a page. The spark is still there, though faint and flickering. It just needs another match to strike it.

What comes next?

A lot has changed since my last post. For starters, I moved all the way across the country to start a 6 month internship in San Francisco. So far, it’s been pretty excited, but still I can’t help but trying to look over the hill at what’s next. For once, there is no road mapped out on what’s coming after this is all over. Within the last four years, I’ve spent so much time agonizing about the next part of my journey. Worried about what steps to take next to build the perfect career and set myself up for a life of success.

And now, I don’t know.

Once this internship ends, I don’t know what will come after. If I’ll stay in California and build a life here, or go back home.

I’ve never been in a situation like this, where I’m not trying to formulate my next steps. Maybe I should be trying to plan it all, but right now, I can’t even imagine where I’ll go. And that’s kind of exciting. For once, the next chapter is a blank slate. Unwritten.

And I have time to figure out what story will fill the pages.

In love with the end

As a writer, my favorite part about the story is the end. The part where every piece finally comes together, and every loose end is tied up at the right time, providing clarity to a murky picture that never seemed that it would ever clear up. I love happy endings. They make all the pain worthwhile.

But, my least favorite part is the middle. The conflict,  building excruciatingly slow towards the climax where it all seems to be spiraling out of control. Nothing makes sense in this part. It seems that no matter where you look, there’s no possible solution that will magically make everything okay. The middle is tough because, somewhere in your mind, you have to stay confident that it will work all out, even when there is no way at all. You have to create it. Write it. You know the end because you’ve already crafted it in your mind.

However, getting there is where the story is. It’s the journey to something beautiful that makes it so. Without it, there would be no happy ending at all.

 

Writing

It’s super hard. I don’t remember ever waking up one day and deciding “Hmm, I think I’ll be a writer today.” I mean, really, why would anyone do that? It’s not the most lucrative path to take, and most of us know that. But still, somehow, someway, it happens. Based on our own willful conscious decision or not, somehow it finds a way to take over us. This overwhelming drive to get the words out of our heads, on paper or on the keyboard.

I’ve tried to push it away so many times, but somehow it always crawls back to me. I have a type of love-hate relationship with the stories in my mind. Sometimes they flow out seamlessly, and other times I have to literally pull them out one slow, painful word at a time.

In the fewest words, writing sucks. And it’s hard. And, I’m sitting here breaking grammar rules as I type by starting a sentence with a conjunction, and you know what the worst part is about it is? All the superficial grammar rules of syntax you memorize in grade school English? They don’t even matter.

Really.

They don’t.

That’s what I’ve come to learn in the world of writing. Most of the time, you can do whatever you want, which is honestly a lot more difficult than following set guidelines. To be honest I wish there was one concrete way to go about it. Quick and easy 1-2-3 steps to follow.

Because then maybe it wouldn’t be so hard!

 

I want the Real

I don’t want to be a pessimist but I more often than not find myself wondering what’s really real nowadays? And I’m not just talking about tv and advertisement although they’re a contributing factor to the “non-reality” that we’re living in. It just seems like even the “real” stuff isn’t even real anymore. Not even good ole, unprocessed, healthy food. Everything seems to be doctored, for an audience, or even for ourselves.

We all talk about social media making us lose touch with reality, but let’s be real (for once at least), that’s only a crutch to throw the blame on. We never really have been real. Not even when strangers ask us “how’s your day?” I mean, this is one chance that you get to actually tell someone what’s on your mind, and you’ll probably never see them again. You could honestly say anything! But, that’s not what any of us do. We mutter a simple “good, you?” if we’re cordial, and go from there, not even processing the answer that they give us back.

Even when we’re alone, it’s difficult to be real. I don’t know if I’m incriminating myself here on how psycho I must sound, but I like to pretend sometimes that there’s an audience in my mind. And, even while I’m alone by myself, I still need to please that audience by making excuses for my own actions and thoughts so that they don’t seem as bad as they actually are. I don’t know if I’m alone on this, or not…But, I’m just being real. And, I wish sometimes, that we all could be.

 

Perfect

Trying to be perfect sucks. Like really REALLY sucks. I don’t know if I can drive that I idea in any harder. I didn’t plan to be a perfectionist, it’s just kind of sort of something that I developed a long time ago. And, now it’s so ingrained into my personality that I feel like there’s no fixing it from here. Perfectionism is constricting. It squeezes every single ounce of creativity that I have inside of me, and rings it out like a washcloth. I’m so afraid of doing things wrong that I end up doing nothing at all. The self-doubt is only one portion of the problems it brings. I can never just allow myself to be me. There always has to be some type of progression if I do something. I don’t give myself space for mistakes. It’s really hard to fight the urge to even backspace some of the words on this page because I can’t bare the thought of messing up, and not even explaining myself right. I have to allow myself to just not make sense sometimes. To just say what I want to say regardless of how it sounds. Everything that I put out into the universe is not going to be some magically crafted piece, and I just have to be okay with that. I have to allow myself to just vomit out words sometimes, regardless of how un-pretty they are. Everything doesn’t have to be neatly tied up in some package and shining bow.

The Truth

I spent the weekend binge watching 13 Reasons Why, and after finishing both seasons within less than 72 hours, a recurring theme really stuck with me. It was the truth. In the series Hannah spoke her truth in her tapes, and while it made sense seeing things from her perspective, it wasn’t quite the same for everyone else. It left me thinking that, what’s true to me might not always be true to another person. We all have our own sides to every story we tell. Our own versions that make sense in our minds.

I wonder how many things I perceived to be true, that weren’t really the truth. Or how many things I’ve done with certain intentions that someone else didn’t quite pick up on. It’s kind of strange to think about. That there could be someone that I’ve met in my life who’s living with an entirely different perspective about something that we experienced together. Both of us have our own ideas about what actually happened, but neither one of them could really be the truth.

I don’t know what this is

So, here goes I guess. I’m still unsure about the purpose that I want this site to serve as. Right now it’s just a place for my thoughts and inspiration. I have so many thoughts a day. So many that they just crowd my mind and I need to find and exit. I’ve thought about blogging for a while but every time I wanted to start, I couldn’t find a direction. I feel like there has to be a theme somewhere. Like people make food blogs, travel blogs, fashion blogs, writing blogs. Blogs for pretty much everything and you know what they all have in common? A central theme. I’m afraid this place is going to look like the inside of my head. Divergent. Thoughts and ideas that can’t be separated, all crammed up into one space. Many it’s because I like so many things. I like food and fashion. I also like to write, and read. I just don’t know if I like them all enough to pick one topic and write solely about that thing. I guess we’ll see what this turns into, if I can keep it going at least.