an introduction to optimism

Hopefully writing isn't like a muscle. Because if it's one of those "Use It Or Lose It" things, and you have to keep flexing it to keep it in shape... Then I'm screwed. The past six-ish months have sapped me of all creative energy that I could possibly have held on my person every day, for a multitude of unknown and maybe fathomed reasons. I don't agree with much Freud says but I like his thoughts on the subconscious and repression--if you repress emotions, they find outlets in other ways. Maybe my outlet was always writing. But when there's no repression there--just pure aggressive release of all emotion at any point in time--then that outlet isn't necessary.

So I've had nothing to write. Big deal. Now I'm graduated and somehow I feel just like that old between-sophomore-and-junior sixteen year old, alone for the summer in a big house full of tile with only the internet and Fuse to keep her company. I feel like that sixteen year old, that single little girl who had never kissed a boy but dreamt about it every night, and felt the itch every hour or so to write down some quote or some lyric imagined up in a split second. You repress any kind of sexual drive and desire and you get imagined love scenes, steamy only because they're vague reproductions of something that'd been seen on tv or stumbled across on the internet. That summer was all fantasy. My fingers wrote, and I lived through those words, through the eyes of the character that I created. I feel just like that girl again, because I'm writing in a blog to no one.

Funny thing is, I'm not that girl anymore. I'm not single, and I've been kissed many many times (by the same boy, of course). I don't have to stumble across romantic love scenes anymore because I know what it's like to live through them (well, maybe not all the way). I don't need Fuse anymore, because the house is sort of full of other people and I can drive and I have money and I can DO things, besides sitting at home all alone, taking morning naps and waiting for the daily phone call from my mother to dictate to me the chores that I needed to do today. I'M NOT THAT GIRL. I'm someone completely different. I'm WRITER (that's my name for now), and I'm eighteen, and I'm free.

...It's just sometimes I get stuck in these ruts where I see myself as that silly sixteen year old, because the circumstances were kind of similar when I woke up this morning, and then the shock is so disabilitating that I can't move.

So this is me trying to break free. The system has finally let me go--now I'm just working on my own bonds and constraints and red tape. You can watch, if you really want to. It's probably going to be a pretty interesting show.

This summer I plan to go on adventures, not just through my mind and psyche in general but in the real world, too. I plan to get my hands dirty and waste lots of gas--I plan to live on little if on anything, but eat really good things and lots of sushi and GO PLACES, and find things that few others in the world have ever found. Accompanying me on this journey will be my best friend, Best Friend, who I think has similar aspirations (besides the sushi part). Hopefully we'll be dragging along Boyfriend, too--but he's got some summer school work to handle and our time together before I leave town for college may be a little more limited than I had originally hoped.

But these are all good things--everything is good things. I'm sick of being pessimistic and realistic. Now is dawning the new age of OPTIMISM. And I'm going to handle it as best I can.