Writing in Color
Sara Spencer
ENGL 1100.46

I have found that what is therapy for me is a source of entertainment for others. Not a ridiculous entertainment, but one that tends to force my audience to look through my eyes, to walk in my proverbial shoes. Its tools include papers, inks, markers, stickers and Post-Its, and an open and cognizant mind. My source of solace and joy has been cemented in nearly 18 years of learning, nearly 18 years of meticulously recording, graphing, feeling and creating… My therapy is writing.

The basis of writing is reading, and I could do so before I walked through the doors into kindergarten. My mother and father gave me toys that taught me the letters of the alphabet. Then they gave me toys that taught me all the basic words. The toys were interactive and they would give me a word, tell me to spell it, and then make me do it over until it was right. C-A-T, Cat. Although I don’t remember all these experiences, I remember not being able to remember a time when all words were foreign.

I could sound out almost anything. Well, I thought I could. I remember riding past a business in Belhaven every day when I was in first grade and finally getting up the courage to ask what the "liv-stock sloppy company" was. To my slight embarrassment, it was a place that sold food for farm animals, and it was actually the Livestock Supply Company. But I tried out everything. I tried to say words that were as tall as I was, and even though most of them came out wrong, I was always greeted with praise and gentle correction, even if that praise and gentle correction were introduced with laughter.

When I got into second grade, I flew through all the reading material within weeks. The teacher, who thought I was just trying to "beat" the other kids, told me to stop, to slow down, but I just couldn’t. I read every single word and loved it. They then gave me the third grade reading material and sent home a note. I remember my mom congratulating me, and then she started buying me more advanced books to read. Most of my junior novels were about horses. This progressed until I was reading horse care manuals and memorizing all the different breeds and their characteristics by the time I was in fourth grade.

Fourth grade also brought another facet into my literacy. I began to write. Not just assignments, but poetry. Horrible poetry. Writing about anything that rhymed, anything that would fit into the line I wanted. My poems were about stupid crushes and horses and my first year at a non public school: Terra Ceia Christian School. The haikus were the worst. Three lines, and nine times out of ten, all of them sucked. (Pardon my vernacular.) They were also an outlet for anger and sadness. I was amazed at how words could convey exactly what I felt, if I thought about them enough, used them my way.

In sixth grade I started keeping journals. Plain notebooks with secrets and drama recorded in my black-inked scrawl. I started getting positive feedback on my school-assigned writing, which made me journal even harder. I would fill a notebook halfway and then rip out the pages and burn them in my backyard because I would read back and find everything so open, so laid out, and I would panic: "What if someone found this? What if they read it?" The questions plagued me, and so I have nothing left from my writing between 6th and 9th grade, except the knowledge I gained from it. No one knew that I burned them. It was a secret for me. My mom smoked and I would swipe her lighter for a while, go into the woods, and watch the notebooks burn. It was rather emotional to see all of it wither into ashes, but to me it felt like a necessary evil.

Most of this journaling was mandatory instead of by choice. Terra Ceia, though a "Christian" establishment, felt more like an institution set up by Satan to speedily and violently drive me to write. All the children at TCCS taunted me, all my old friends from public school moved on without me. I had no one but my pen and myself when within it’s walls. Gradually new friendships and a sense of belonging occurred, but there was always a feeling that I was a third wheel, and I told my notebooks that, and they commiserated.

I perfected my methods of journaling at Terra Ceia: notebooks paper, black ink, and carefully written, observant notes in the margins. I always reread what I wrote. I wanted to be able to understand it later when I reflected upon it. I thought there was no sense in it if a reader couldn’t get sense out of it. My pattern of writing and checking and burning fell away during my latter days of high school, prompted by the same type of move that prompted its beginning years before.

Northside High School changed my style. It changed my style of writing as well as living. There, the divisions between classes of people and religion, background, family lives, all of it was shattered. At lunch I sat among people who wore name brands and also people who wore their scarred lives like brands, literally and figuratively. I never knew that people were so touchingly real. I never knew that people existed outside of the lines of what the Terra Ceia Christian School hypocrites thought was right and good.

I found that there I could be who I wanted, "no holds barred", no "holier than thou" facades, just me. I started writing about all these people, all these observations on their broken lives and what held them together. I also started writing on paper without lines; I wanted nothing more to do with the rules that I had just escaped. When particularly fervent about a topic, I strayed from my typical black pen and used thick black sharpies, and also red ones. I embraced color. My journals were works of art, sometimes all the words overlapped so much I couldn’t even read them. I stopped burning them, and I liked them better when I couldn’t make any sense of it at all.

I also started keeping a Xanga, which is a blog. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I wanted feedback. I also wanted a faster outlet than actually sitting and writing everything. I found myself probing the inner corners of my soul on that blog, and then I found myself swimming in a sea of other people, some friends, some strangers, who shared some of the same experiences. Most of them didn’t spin words around their situations, but they all told their stories to me in intimate and differing languages, each their own.

I used emoticons and italics, bold, and even different font size to convey my feelings. I wrote tome-like entries. My friends both grumbled and enjoyed their forays into my entries, which took "too much time to read" and "didn’t have to be that long. It’s not like it was an assignment." They often spanned five pages single-spaced when pasted into Word. I pasted them into Word a few times just for the standard length reference that it would provide. I never save backups of my entries. I prefer to take to chance of them disappearing into cyberspace. I developed a more efficient way to express myself and organize my thoughts and I also found courage in the fact that I had an apt audience.

In senior year AP English, I wrote striking papers without even flinching. I tore through essays whose prompts bored me to death, and on Xanga I kept a meticulous account of my existence. I developed an art out of my mundane life, striving to find beauty in nothingness, in everyday interaction. Such an occasion happened in March of this year:

I could have frozen Katie there in time, thoughtful expression, guitar in hand, dark curly ponytail spilling over her shoulders, giving us a tune, holding us down because the world was spinning. Chris was just laying there, occasionally he would speak, and I thought of how much I would miss them when school ended. How much they have done and haven't done and how much I haven't done and have done. Even when Katie stopped strumming, her dad was in the next room playing for Danny, and it was like a movie for me, when the main character is thinking and everything slows down and there is music.

Rampant thoughts were streaming through my mind. Mortality and fragility and beauty and normalcy and the thought of grasping onto something so hard that it would have broken time. It was a kind of gentle panic, a dull earthquake of emotion. I wanted to both scream and cry at the same time while being perfectly still. Everything was so perfect and yet everything was about to fall apart. It was overwhelming, so overwhelming, the air was beautiful and cloying and suffocating me. (Spencer)

Occasionally, when the normal hub-bub of life became lackluster, I would make my own prompts of sorts and write about them until I either was thoroughly disgusted or had nothing left to say. Most of the subjects were morbid. I have a morbid obsession. I would write about what I would say to people if I was dying, I would write about the intricacies of being human and knowing that you will face your own demise in a matter of time unknown to you. I learned to use my writing not only for expression but for discovery as well. When writing nonchalantly about a subject, one says things that they really have no control over. I was no longer a mystery when I looked in the mirror, I was who I was, and I was that person because it was innate and also because I realized her strength and ideas. Without those critical times of journaling late in my high school career, I would still be teeming with possibilities and yet still hidden.

Thus, my writing has slowly evolved into what it is today. It is a bit of an obsession, a bit of a survival technique, and also a bit of my soul on paper. I still journal, though not as much. I keep a calendar with wide margins and a pen by my bed, and record everything that happens to me every day. Other than what I have learned about myself, I have learned that even the everyday experiences are important, they all matter in their own way. The only thing is that they slip away so fast that their memories can often dissipate with the time. At least I know that my memories will never fade, and my experiences will last as long as the paper in my notebooks, both virtual and tangible.