My favorite essay

I am grateful for online storage space! My freshman year, I wrote a personal essay that I absolutley loved. But I thought I had lost it. Today, I had the inspiration to search my gmail account for the essay... and Voila! I found it!

So, I'm posting it below. Remember, I was a freshman, and just having fun. I'm sure that if I were to edit it, I'd change lots of things. But I'm not. I'll put it in it's pure form below. It's long. So... you don't have to read it. But I would like you to, when you have a moment. I mean, this essay is why I am an English major-- because secretly, I really do love to write.

March 29, 2007

I pick up my pen, then drop it. I take a sideways glance at my journal. It’s just sitting there—open and waiting. It’s almost ridiculous. What am I afraid of? What is the worst that could possibly happen?
Mixed feelings jumble around inside of me as I approach my journal. It is just sitting there on my desk, calm and serene—without a care in the world. I feel almost as though it mocks me. I have had such a rough day, and it just sits there. My journal has no cares to burden it or bring it low. But I do. And I need to get everything out, to reason within myself. So my grades aren’t perfect. I’m trying. If my parents are finding happiness, then their divorce shouldn’t bother me. And so what if my best friends are coupling up, and I’m lonely? I have other friends, and can make new ones.
A sigh escapes me; I’m so tired, and sleep hasn’t been coming easily. I would really just love to take a nap. But there is a fire simmering within that is beginning to grow. I sit down in front of my untouched companion, that journal of mine. I want to release my thoughts and emotions, but I can’t get myself to let them out. Words and phrases begin to form in my mind as I stare at my journal. If I can but set them down, take them out of my head and put them onto the paper, perhaps the fire of emotions can be suppressed.
But yet, I wonder…
What will they think of me, my future posterity to whom I am writing? My problems are not monumental or unique. They are the same problems that face hundreds of others. My children and my grandchildren… who will they think I am? Some sorry, weak girl who is having a pity party? Will they laugh? Or will they see me trying futilely to deal with the realities of life, as I try in vain to express precisely how I feel—even though no there are no words to perfectly describe the turmoil inside me.
Then my mind catches on another, more pathetic idea. What does anyone think of me? A poor writer such as myself, I can’t even say what I mean in a personal journal. Do I express myself well in public? I sure can’t do it on paper. The questions progress from bad to worse as I wonder what my friends must think of me.
I shake my head and decide to take a walk.
I aimlessly meander through the streets and find myself wandering from Deseret Towers towards campus. I change my course. What I need is solitude—a chance to be alone and to hear myself think. And campus is always crowded. So instead of walking through the crowds of campus, I choose to walk around the whole of campus itself. I want to get the bigger picture and to avoid the clamor that everyone else creates as they shuffle through their own lives and go about their own business.
I walk for a while, mostly just moving to be moving. But then, my breath catches in my throat as I reach my favorite spot just south of campus. I pause against the fence and stare down at the town below, but it is not as pretty in the grey light that is left in the day. Right now, I can see the buildings, square and plain. The view brings me no joy. But in my mind’s eye, I remember the beauty of the town’s lights as they sparkled against the night sky on one side while being suddenly cut off by the mountains on the other. Soon the image fades, and I move on.
I finally get home, back to the dorms, and my body crumples onto the bed, I’m still exhausted, and my emotions are still raging. My eyes rest for a moment on the bulletin board above my bed, and a smile begins to form on my lips as I read the kind notes people have given me. I see the paper heart from my cousin that tells me that she misses me, and the slip of paper from my roommate that calls me beautiful. I notice my invitation to homecoming that had been ingeniously delivered. Then my eye catches on the picture of my best friend and me from the day our outfits had unintentionally matched. I re-read a sweet thank you that I didn’t know I had deserved; then, I laugh at a punny and anonymous valentine tucked into the very corner of my board.
My legs swing down from the bed, and land on the floor. My stomach growls—I haven’t eaten yet. So I head to the Morris Center. Before I walk the 20 feet from my building to the Morris Center door, I run into two different people, who greet me with huge smiles. Their joy is infectious, and I begin to grin with them. I grab some pasta from the Cougar Cove and head back up to my room.
When I get there, I begin to heat up my dinner, and I clear some space in my busy life in order to make room on my desk. I again reflect on the day. Really it wasn’t so bad, there is just so much going on. And I have so much to do. The more I think, the more I realize how much I have to get done, and there are only 24 hours in a day.
My emotions swell, and I can’t control them any longer. If I wasn’t so stubborn, I might cry, but tears don’t do anything. I want to control my emotions, not let them control me. The only way to do that is to set them free, organized, on paper. So I pick up my pen, and I begin to write. What does it matter what anyone thinks? This is my life, and these things are happening to me, silly though they might sound. I’ve got to express how I feel, or I’ll go insane.
At first, my pen is slow, but gradually my ideas start to flow and my pen flies. The words pour forth: fighting, wrestling, yearning to make their way onto the page. I cannot keep up with their frenzied fury. Words begin to merge, then fall, and I’ve lost them; they’ve slipped into oblivion. But my pen still flies and fills the pages with my woes until
It stops. I’m stuck. I really can’t express this feeling with this word, and I begin groping around the recesses of my mind trying to find that other word, the perfect word that says what I mean better than I can. I try in vain to hear it, as if someone was whispering it to me, too soft to hear. My ears stretch and I strain even harder when suddenly, my mind clears, and the word seems to leap up at me. Once I’ve captured it, the flow resumes.
Feverishly I scribble, and the words gush from the fountain of my thoughts. Then the words begin to trickle; the tide of words is ebbing, and my feelings are subsiding. My fingers slow, and my breathing resumes its normal pace. (I realize that I was holding my breath in anticipation of the end.)
I put my pen down, and it is finished. The fire is out.
Calmly, I look over the pages that have changed from the innocent, untainted white to the almost haggard, scribbled upon pages that now lie before me. They almost seem charred, blackened by the ink of my pen. But now that they are filled, I am empty. The torrent of emotions has subsided, and I can glance over the issues in my life and put them in perspective. Really things aren’t so bad. Tough, but do-able.
I read over my work, changing phrases here and there to better express what I mean, and to take some of the drama out of my entry. Because really, life is good. It only seems overwhelming for a small moment.
And it doesn’t matter what they will think. Perhaps my children will laugh at me, but I’m a silly girl, so why not? And besides, the tempest that raged within me has calmed, I have fought through and conquered the squall of emotions that held me back. Things are clearer; a ray of sunlight has broken through the clouds. My confidence has returned, and I go to bed with a smile.
I sleep that night the peaceful sleep of victory. My pen and journal rest, exhausted, on the desk beside my bed. Let my journal work through the torrent of emotions, for I am free. For the moment, all of my cares are no longer just my own. They belong to the pages of my journal. And I, I can forget my worries from today and dream of the possibilities of tomorrow.