Overdramatize it.

"I could write and write. All it takes is a motion of the hand in response to a brain impulse, trained from childhood to record in our own American brand hieroglyphics the translations of external stimuli. How much of my brain is willfully my own?"

- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals

I am almost frightened by how much I am seeing my writing reflected in the free-writes of a woman who shoved her head into an oven at the age of thirty to commit suicide. She was born in Massachusetts and would be Mimi's age if she were alive today. The first section of journal entries in the book are from Plath's early college years and the things she writes about are so appropo of exactly everything I am feeling at this point in my life. She is so real and so tangible. But at the same time, she is so frightening because I see this girl who is teetering on the edge of living to live and living to write about it.

I recognize that precipice so readily because I know that to be exactly where I am standing. Writing has always been my escape, my outlet, my own entangled world of words and metaphors and untold stories. And now I've started to live there. It's the vacation that is lasting far too long.

It's days like this when I feel the pull to overstay my welcome in my solitude and literature that I most desperately need people. It gets hard to wrench yourself away and accept the world. I consider writing, in its purest form, to be nothing but an aspect of depression: a need to be away from everything and everyone except for your own twisted mind.

I praise God for my writing moments and when I get the inspiration to embrace the depression/feelings but I also praise Him for blessing me with people who have the place in their hearts and minds to know when I need them to rescue me. Tonight alone: I had Caitlin to talk to about boys. I had Taylor to dance with, fall on the floor with and hug. I had Jordan smile at me when I needed it most. I had Ellie (Brisket) to make silly faces at me. I had Nick playing his amazing music that brightens my day every time I get the chance to hear it. I had Serenity to go get dinner with. I had Alex to walk to Jimmy John's with. And now I have Dana to fall asleep in the same room as.

I have all of these reasons, these beautiful people, why I will never become Sylvia Plath. I am far too in love with these human relationships and the way they influence me as a person and as a writer.

Creative Maximus.

Charge on, young, semi-confident writer and see what deep depths you can avoid today while banging on your keys in your Sad Café.

Yesterday in both Fundamental’s of Directing classes, Burnham addressed the idea of a window. It’s kind of this beautiful metaphor for something that I feel like I understand but can’t believe I have a full grasp on. It’s alluding me just that little bit. The world looks like the world you are looking through the window you are looking out of. So we have two realities here: the world, reality, and the reality that your schemata and way of looking at the world have created. Your window is like your personal pair of rose colored glasses through which you can see the world, tinted in a manner that makes it more appealing to you. Things that are important to your mental model stick out and are over dramatized in comparison to the things that are of less importance to you, personally. The beauty of the window metaphor is that it highlights the fact that you can see your reflection in a window. There is nothing that prevents you from taking a moment to examine yourself in that window rather than what you see through it. That’s the beauty of introspection. Some windows are too fascinating to look out of and don’t allow time for one to see how they are perceiving things. Other windows, however, are tailored specifically to showing us who we are in relation to why we do what we do and how that influences our current state of being. For example, the window of relationships in my life is reflective; all I see are the mistakes I am making because of my parents. Each window represents another portion of your schemata: relationships, stress, schoolwork, morals, eating habits, etc. Each one of those is a very important part of your hardwired mental mapping and that individual pattern of yours can be either very apparent to you or very obscured from you.

Another point that Burnham brought up with this was that once you see your own reflection and realize who you are becoming or what you embodying, that you get the rebellion right. I guess that point is one that is more specific to the event that took place or the reflection that you saw. The idea that you can rebel in the right way connects to the reading from last night about the creative maxims. We need to use everything that’s been given to us. If we look in the mirror and we see a crazy mother, we need to find a way to make that crazy mother into a creative thought that can inspire a great work of art. It’s using our windows and the views we see through them and in them to create more things and become deeper, more inspirational artists.

To Succeed.

I've spent a lot of this past week working through free-writing and paying attention to that creative artist within me. It's been extremely healthy for me to sit down every night and bang out one page, singled spaced diatribes about my day. I've also been reading a lot this week, most importantly a book on the art of writing called Thunder and Lightning by Natalie Goldberg. This book has really helped me understand myself as a writer and accept the fact that writing doesn't need to be brilliant or profound, it just needs to be honest, from the heart and accessible. One of the many writing exercises Goldberg speaks of in her book is sitting down to reread your old free writes and then spending another page writing down what you felt like were the points you harped upon in your free streams of consciousness.

That was the hardest for me because I had to introspectively analyze myself and my thoughts. A little part of me wished that I could have just deleted that giant word document and moved on, but alas, what would we be if we didn't change and grow from inward reflection?

One of the points I found myself focusing on was less of a point and more of a collection of mini vignettes of the most beautiful human beings in my life. I've always had a hard time letting people know how much they mean to me. I feel like they could never be aware of what an impact their being in my life has had on the course of it all and who I am as a human being. And I want them to. I want them to feel a hundred times better about themselves because they've touched someone's life in such a beautiful way that it should be announced. So I write. I spend my nights free writing pages upon pages about you all. Sometimes I am even able to share them with you, so that you can see how much you mean to me, how much you've served to mold me into a better person.

I hope that, as time passes, I am able to share my writings with you and tell you just how much you mean to me. If you feel the same way as I do, with those essential people in your life, I encourage you to remind them how much they mean to you in whatever manner you see fit. To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children...to leave the world a better place...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

Let someone know that they have succeeded.