Starting over again..

 

     Everytime I sit down to write, nothing happens.  It's not because I don't have anything to write about, nor is it writer's block in the traditional sense.  It feels more like I have so many feelings and ideas circulating around in my mind that I cannot possibly get them out and onto the page fast enough.

    Structured writing was never my strong suit, and I tend to leave thoughts and words scattered around.  It feels more authentic to me that way, but understandably, incredibly frustrating to read.  I'll try to break things up, but I am making a promise to myself right now, this one:  Whatever is on the page when I click enter to a new paragraph will stay, just how it is written, and I won't go back and edit it for continuity or flow purposes.  If this is what the inside of my mind looks like on a page, then so be it.

    I'll start with this.  It is my nineteenth birthday.  It is also the day I dropped out of college, officially.  I feel simultaneously much younger and much older than I am, and I think that is a common experience.  19, to me, feels like a liminal space.  No one else is experiencing 19 quite the same way I am, and that can be a lonely thought.  I dropped out of college specifically for that reason.

    I was so sure that going back to North Florida, all the way from DC, seeing the people I went to middle school with at the tiny little university campus where I planned to study nursing would be the change I needed, the restart I needed, to get my life back on track and feel like myself again after so many years of living in that liminal space.  It wasn't.  If anything, it was more liminal.  And I am severely overusing that word because it is the most elegant way to describe a feeling of such derealization and disconnection from reality that it becomes crippling.  And that is the truth.  So I left, after rushing a sorority and spending so much time with new friends, and doing well enough in classes and celebrating a high score on a practical and crying after failing an exam.  I left because none of it, not the bad, not the good, felt real.

    So that is my goal.  To feel real again.  To write it all out on a page because the words are real and tangible and readable and I can read and reread over and over and over again as much as I want just so long as I don't. start. over.