Shoes On The Wrong Feet

I do not remember when I first started writing.  I have notebooks with my writings in them dating back to 1987, back farther still if you count my lockable diary I got when I was in the third grade.  I enjoyed playing with words, pairing words not typically seen together, just to hear how they would sound, what type of vibe they would give off.  In high school English class I would learn the rules so that I could “break” them.  Oh yes, little defiant me would start sentences with (gasp!) and.  I would put quotations around thin air on the top of the page and claim that to be the title of my poem when our teacher required all our poems to have titles.  I remember writing a poem about an obtuse triangle who wished to be a right triangle (yes, I know, what a great topic, right!) and drawing a picture of a triangle as my title.  And that was a couple years before Prince changed his name to the Love Symbol.

In my early teen years I wrote a lot about darkness and was really hung up on the color gray as a feeling of not right or wrong, not black or white, not alive or dead – just somewhere in between unsure and occasionally forgotten.

In school I had a good solid group of friends but most of the boys I hung out with were not the type you would want your daughter spending time with.  I listened to butt rock, hair bands, and a bit of The Cure for good measure.  I acted the bad girl role but could never really fully commit to it.  I dated guys that were a couple years older then me.  I put myself in situations that could have been disastrous but were not.  Through all of it I wrote.

I do not remember if it was the end of my junior year or the start of my senior one that I started dating and eventually became engaged to a manipulative, emotionally abusive, prick whom I will refer to as Asshat.  I stayed with Asshat for over three years.  A lot can happen in three years and during that time I stopped writing.  I did manage to complete almost a year of college before the monies I had saved, which should have lasted for several, ran out.  We sold everything we owned, and ended up living out of our Buick Regal for a couple months before landing in Arizona where we couch surfed at Asshat’s friends places.

When I was finally able to screw my courage to the sticking place and leave him I was too proud to ask my parents for help.  I stayed in Arizona and built myself back up.  But for some reason I did not start writing again.  I worked, gained residency and promptly got myself back into college.  I got a degree in the sciences where the only writing I had to do was technical with pretty graphs and eye blurring printouts of DNA sequences.  I met Husband and we dated for six and a half years before getting married.  Four years later we had Cody followed by Carter two years after that.  But still I did not write.

Seven months ago and 100 posts later here I am – writing.