Teen Angst

I’ve almost always been a person who keeps a journal.  Not as much now for recording everyday events as I did previously however, I do write down what’s going on from time to time.  In the past I would record almost every exciting or depressing thing that happened to me.  My journal was my friend, my confidant and a place only for me and me alone.  In the early years it was more of a diary and spelled out exactly who I was crushing on and when I happened to see them.  Later it was some of the same, but also more creative writing.  This photo is a picture of one of my journal covers from that time period.  The writing inside is full of angst, love lost, rejection, poor self-image and more.  Every time I crack the cover to this or one of my other books, it brings all those feelings back with force.  And the voice is so interesting too, the kinds of words I used, the language.  It was truly raw.

I don’t know about you, but aging is certainly a strange phenomenon.  It seems like those angst filled days were just yesterday but at the same time I feel like my life now is in such a different place.  Writing Angst, has brought a lot of those feelings, emotions and stories back to me and I cringe now to see how terribly unsure I was, how insecure about my looks or my worth as a person and sometimes honestly the feelings it brings back are negative and kind of scary and it makes me want to slam the cover and never look back again.  I do wish I hadn’t been so afraid and unsure!  Things would have certainly been different, however do I really wish things were different?  I don’t think I do.  I think I needed to learn those lessons, to be rejected to learn who I really am.  Of course that’s easy to say now that I no longer experience so much drama!  But that drama was excellent for writing.  It gave me so much ammo, so much emotion to hurl around.  In some ways, I miss that, but I definitely don’t want to live through that time in my life again!  Not unless I could take my current knowledge with me.

Reading those old journals fuels me now and gives me inspiration about what to write.  It puts me in the right frame of mind and brings me back to the old me.  It has also shown me that my writing has certainly improved.  In those days I was prone to exaggeration and stylistic, almost prissy language at times.  Although that was not always true, some of the scribbles are pure teenager.  Now and then I can find a gem in those books, something written on the fly that really speaks, that represents the exact emotions I was feeling at the time.  I love to find that kind of writing, where I was somehow in the zone.  And it was those up and down emotions that really allowed me to write so well.  In some ways I do miss that.  Now I have emotions about different things.  I guess I need to put those emotions to work now in writing.   Do you have something that fuels your writing?  A certain time in your life?  I find I am drawn to very emotional writing or topics.  I want to write about the rawest times during someone’s life.  Those times are truly interesting to me, even if they are the most painful to relive.