A Mess of a Story

I don’t know if I will ever truly reach “inner peace”. I am a stupid teenager in a stupid world with stupid friends and a stupid life. However, stupidity isn’t always a bad thing, or even negative...in my life, anyway. Stupid can be messy, and angsty, and hard-headed like myself. A messy and cluttered brain -or a “glitchy brain” in my therapist's words- means I have a variety of options to choose from to help express myself, and ways to turn the stupidity into creativity, using that to make the art I call writing...it’s like recycling.

On my endless journey to find “inner peace”, I utilize a lot of my time writing. I have always been a writer, ever since I was six years old, and gained access to a colored pencil and a wild imagination. I do not believe that one has to be such a genius as J.K. Rowling to be considered an author. All that is needed is a pen, some paper, or a computer, or a phone, or anything to spill ideas onto a document in some sort of unique way to create a story. It could be a list, a journal entry, a 500,000-word novel, or a blurb about a nice-looking man seen while going on a morning run. Whatever it is I may put a pen to paper about, it becomes an integral piece to the puzzle of my life. A part of my story.

That is my absolute favorite thing about writing...it doesn’t have rules. And I’m not talking about grammar and spelling, that’s different. What I mean is there are endless possibilities that I can turn into writing, into a story. There is no defined right or wrong I have to follow. Mistakes can be pretty, and faults glamorized. All of the stupid, stupid thoughts in my head can be recycled into my own characters and their arcs and the plotlines...I could go on and on and on. Creating new worlds and putting thoughts from my own head into one of my character’s heads is what brings me the closest I’ll ever be to “inner peace”. It’s my creative outlet, one that will never cease to be my form of self-expression.

After rereading this a few times, I’ve come to the conclusion that my “inner peace” is not peaceful at all. It’s quite the opposite, actually. Peacefulness for me is when I am knees deep in another reality, fighting demons through made-up characters that feel so real to me that I could almost reach out and brush fingertips with them. Peacefulness for me is scrolling through writer’s blogs when I should be asleep, my brain overloaded on caffeine as I excitedly come up with new chapter ideas. Peacefulness for me is when I complete the last paragraph of a story I spent days, weeks, months maybe, piecing together bit by bit the perfect reality into something beautiful, and giving it a title before I celebrate, and then begin a new storyline right away. My words are messy and different in a way I understand. Nobody else has to understand it. That is what brings me my own kind of peace.

So maybe I will never find true “inner peace” as some define it. Maybe I am okay with that, maybe I am not. I surely don’t need to think about it now. I can’t even legally drive yet, let alone swim in the deep unknowns of the future. But alas, here I am doing just so. For now, I suppose I’ll continue to focus on creating new worlds and living through my characters, because that brings me as close to my own “inner peace” as I’ll possibly get, and boy, is it glorious.