Four A.M. Chronicles

I don’t work traditional hours. I am often up at four am because the creative juices are flowing and I don’t want to stop. My children have a routine. They sneak into my room while I sleep and turn on their current favorite show, Scooby-Doo or Bread Barbershop. When my alarm goes off, I pull out my phone, my iPad, and my MacBook to start checking my dashboards to see how my stories are doing, check my email for freelance contracts, and make my to-do list for the day. I am a writer. I create worlds, paint pictures with words, and express the emotions everyone has. “Are you done typing mommy?” my son asks while peering into my screen. I pause to feed my toddlers' breakfast and breastfeed my newborn. We switch over to YouTube preschool videos. “What day is it? What day is it? What’s the day of the week?” I sing as I share on my socials and scroll for challenges and competitions to enter. I lament the bartending job I left and the cash I counted every night. It can become tedious building a following and troll for likes. Then I get that like or share or subscription that every artist craves and it fuels my next post.

I have always needed to write. Ever since I first learned to draw my letters, I used them to create stories and poetry. I filled journals and notebooks with the ego-driven scribbles of adolescence. More than just odes to my sense of self-importance, each entry stood as evidence of my traumatic experiences. It was the only way I could process events way beyond my maturity level and emotional capacity. When I ended up spending a large portion of high school in the hospital, writing articulated my reality to my peers. I would do readings of my journal entries and transcribe copies of them for other patients to keep because they said I “ put into words what they felt but couldn’t say.” That was the highest compliment I have ever received. I wrote until my hands were cramped and my eyes were blurred, scribbling on the backs of pages and in the margins of notebooks. I would scrawl on my skin and detail tiny print along my bedroom walls, often not remembering what manic tailspin I was coming out of. I needed to channel this passion for expression or explode.

I was introduced to performing in college and my world was opened to a whole new release of endorphins. I was full of so much anxiety, fear, and shame from my adolescence. It lingered around me and the only way I could find to dissipate it was to get in front of people and expose all the ugly parts of myself. I slowly built up a presence until I was able to let that persona take the lead. That confidence spilled over into other aspects of my life. I was writing my future, speaking life into the person I wanted to become. I got lost in service work, distracted by tables and slinging drinks. At the end of a twelve, thirteen, or fourteen-hour shift, I could barely walk much less string any sentences together. My gift languished in the background, waiting for me to pick it back up, waiting for me to shine the light of the focus on it again. Until then, I collected pieces of my future novel on order pads, crumpled them into my apron, and absorbed personality details from my customers. Fifteen years of customer service might as well have been an in-depth character study.

Post pandemic, I finally get to spend my days writing and that is how I feed my family. For a long time, I did not know if anybody wanted to read or hear what I had to say. Then I figured that my voice was important just because nobody else would have one exactly like mine. Nobody else would have my perspective, experiences, emotions, or thoughts. I share it to describe what someone else might be going through in case they don’t have the words for it and so they will know they are not alone. I create a written record the equivalent of the age-old tag, “I was here! “The acknowledgment of the importance of their existence relative to their place in the world is all anyone wants. If I can help someone navigate their place while eliciting an emotional response, then I have done my job. The best part is I can do it while my children sing their ABCs in the background instead of being away from them seventy hours a week tempting alcoholism in a bar. If you want to support more of my creativity, I have short stories and poetry available on my author’s page for your reading pleasure. You can subscribe to my page to be notified of new posts. If you enjoy what you read, you can leave a tip or share.