#100blogfest entry: If You Can Feel It, Write It

One of the most feared phrases in childhood, “Come up and read in front of the class.” For some this ranks somewhere between the embarrassing nightmare of finding yourself naked in front of the class and having your mother drop you off at school, waving “Be safe Poopsy!” out the window. However, this was not the case with me. At 9 years old I was writing my own little homemade books, with titles like The Mud Man, and volunteering to read them in front of class. I have always had a desire to write and share my thoughts with others. This same love for writing is what I believed saw me through the tumultuous years of my adolescence. I can still remember sitting alone in my room listening to Jimi Hendrix’s Axis:Bold as Love album, eating Top Ramen and tuna with Pace picante sauce, and writing ardently about how alone and depressed I felt.

I had a loving family and some good friends, but there is just something about that time of your life where you can be surrounded by people and reasons to be happy yet you just can’t get yourself to see it.  Maybe it’s just the biochemical warfare of hormones that are in full scale war within your developing body that causes this depression, even so it feels so real at the time and you just can’t see past it. Luckily for me I could sublimate these feelings with my pen writing as fast as I could think. Sometimes my thoughts would be so deep they didn’t seem to belong to a teenager. I would contemplate the very molecules that made up our existence and why these molecules should make us any more important than anything else living or inanimate. Was it the “soul” that made us special? And if so, what made up this soul? It couldn’t be made up of anything different than the matter that made up the universe and was subject to the laws of physics like any other matter. Yes, I was actually thinking these thoughts at age 17 and even composed the following poem:

On trial is the existence of a soul...

The prosecution opens...
Show me a man with a soul, and I'll show you
a man with a grand illusion. For while we are
given a mind that yearns to know the reason for
its existence, strives to realize its purpose,
it finds it hard to see past the grand illusion.
It denies its ephemeral existence in this eternal
universe, and thereby invents the immortal soul.
The defense objects...
What about the emotions of love, happiness and sorrow,
all those things that make us unique as human beings?
Can these be attributed to anything but a soul?
The prosecution regretfully replies...
Those unique attributes of which you speak are only as
real as the physiochemical reactions that make them up.
It is we who have made them out to be more than they
really are.
The defense abhorrently objects...
Humanity reduced to mere physiochemical reactions!?
I'm afraid it is you my friend who suffers from the grand
illusion.
The defense and prosecution rest. It is left for us,
the jury of humankind, to decide.

So while some kids my age were deciding which mall they wanted to hang out I was busy pondering our very existence …. Now when I see other kids that age wearing the same far off look and wearing the heavy comportment of adolescent sorrow, I will counsel them with these wise words: If you can feel it, write it. You will see that what flows out from your pen, or types out on the screen, are not just images and symbols of communication arranged in agreed upon grammatical structure …. No, they become more than the sum of their parts as you create a window that enables you to see who you really are, and that undoubtedly is someone special and unique.