sjsprWriting

So, I'm told a memoir is supposed to be a part of your life that you write when you’re comfortable enough to talk about it. It’s where you are unafraid of revisiting, possibly even redressing, matters that may or may have not eaten away at you at one point or another. Or maybe it’s all the points, and you relive the sense of distraught and reconvene at the bellowing archway of demons that has followed you in such a tortuous manner that you fail to realize that’s what makes it linear; there’s only been so many cliff-falls and roundabouts that you may as well have walked straight ahead. Or better yet, not have moved at all.

A memoir is all about distance, and about the closure that that elapsed space or time provides to your own burgeoning sense of security towards a judgment or criticism you have once feared. Well, I’m seventeen years old and I feel every ounce of fear, every “try-hard,” every “you're a faggot,” every tear shed without solace in my unlit room, every mirror I stared at hours on end- thinking they would all break and collectively find their way to my doorstep, every “weird,” every important talk with the wrong words being chosen, or rather the right words being relentlessly unspoken. I fear every moment of the past, and fear the revelation of these moments beckoning a near-immediate future I do not wish to bear. One with loved ones shunning me, and friends prematurely keying the words “bitch” and “asshole” on my non-existent car. But I also see something worth all the years I have yet to stifle, have yet to embrace. I see a future with a soul that is cleansed, freshly reproduced and set to ignite every cell of the human body; to glisten through the deep cuts that plaster the mind of an emotionally-restrained-and-unkempt-at-the-same-time teenager. The incredibly biased force of gravity positioned directly above my shoulders would dissipate into a shell of its former self, and somewhere in this wild, shambled semblance of a universe, I’d be standing on the apex of my own world constructed of nothing but stacks of misused words and overly obnoxious rants too long to be written on paper but written anyways because I was too stubborn not to.

My intention is that this piece of writing, if I may call it that, serves not only as a personal impetus, but as a beacon of sorts, telling angsty teenagers and bewildered young adults that they are not alone, and that new beginnings may start the moment you decide to rid yourself of loose ends. I know, cliché at best. But how many times have you been told that’s what our young, unfulfilled lives are: haplessly walking, poorly-dressed, emotionally unstable, brash-for-no-reason clichés. I suppose I like to think a little differently. I believe us loners- because let’s face it, every teenager or young adult is a loner one way or another- have something special, a collective uniqueness, if you will. We all feel the same pressure: girls, boys, sex, alcohol, drugs, looks, parents, responsibility, grades, sleep, etc. You name it we hate it, or love it; maybe both. And we all have this uncertainty that maybe we’re not ready, perhaps we missed a step on that subconscious checklist that tells us if we’re prepared to plunge into the “shark tank” that they say our lives will be. If we let the fear of our pasts control us, how would we ever even fathom trying to brace ourselves for the future if all we’re doing is expecting the worst when we think the reason our pasts were so gut-wrenchingly malevolent or mind-numbingly droll was because they were just premeditated warm-ups for things to come. Our pasts are every bit as part of us as the skin that we find disgusting or the fat we find too noticeable. So the question is: how do we love ourselves if we hate something so intricately attached to us that it can almost be felt breathing down our necks, but only seen in discarded photo albums and seemingly-indifferent clocks. Well, I guess the answer is that we learn to love that part of us, too. Or at the very least, we figure out how to tolerate it. So this is me trying to tolerate it; both my seventeen year old past and present. I can only aspire that in doing so it catapults me to a future where I am more hopeful than crestfallen. In which I may properly surmise that my readers and I just overwhelmed one of the more difficult aspects that the human condition so politely has to offer, a meticulous introspection of the selves we used to be from the vantage of who we all so reasonably wish to become: loved, sure, substantial adults who know how and what to live for.