Feelings are weird because no matter how many facts are available, it almost always feels like your feelings matter more. Growing up, I never felt like anybody listened to me. I was raised with 5 siblings, so, that more or less made me the middle child. I hated it so much, for more reasons than one. The main reason being that my voice always seemed to get drowned out by the louder, more important, noise of my siblings. Importance is subjective and volume is irrelevant if you have something important (read: again, subjective) to say.
I have always hated fighting. I consider myself an angry pacifist. Scratch that—I’m a passionate pacifist, and I correct myself because words matter. I learned this when I first started writing.
When I was in elementary school, I was a strange child. I didn’t like to speak in public, yet I always raised my hand in class. Eventually, my teachers would tell me, “If it’s important, and we have enough time, we’ll get back to it. For now, write it down.” That’s where it all began. Throughout my life people have been telling me to write down what I wanted to say.
If you took a look at any of my notebooks you’d see notes upon notes, peppered through the margins. Look in my phone, peek at my laptop, come to my bedroom and look at the walls, look at my desk—what I’m getting at is, I can’t stop writing. My voice is everywhere. It lives in my purses on scrap pieces of paper. It lives on tens of post-it notes, stuck and fallen apart and stained with water all over my other bedroom at school. I have spent my whole life trying to figure out a way to say what I felt like nobody was listening to by writing, which has become a sort of catharsis—a coping mechanism if you will.
It all comes back to that point of interest, “Importance”. For a while I couldn’t write anymore because I was stuck wondering, “Who cares?” All I ever wanted was first and foremost to be heard, and then to have something important to say.
I used to get anxiety just opening a Word doc. This actually happens often, if I’m being honest. Note: I haven’t published anything on this blog since December of 2016, we’re halfway through March of 2017. This is not a coincidence. I just didn’t have anything important to say.
I texted a very close friend of mine, on multiple occasions actually, and asked him what I should do when I wanted to write, but didn’t have anything important to say. He simply replied, “Just write anyway. Who cares if it’s important or not?” I’ve been told I get too obsessed with the idea of importance, and it hinders my ability to create anything. So, I took his advice. I just wrote. I wrote in my phone. I wrote in my laptop. I wrote in my notebooks when I should have been taking class notes. I tweeted. I made a tumblr blog. I filled this blog with unpublished drafts of thoughts upon thoughts about everything, nothing. It didn’t matter because I was writing.
Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” It is safe to assume that my writing holds no significance to anybody but myself, my parents, and my professors (depending on whether or not it is an assignment). I do it anyway. I will continue to do it. Whether or not what I say bears any importance is irrelevant because, depending on whom you ask, it could mean the world or nothing at all. In the end though, at least I was heard and that is what I wanted in the first place.