by Jessica Kuzmier

Created on: November 20, 2010   Last Updated: June 02, 2011

I sit in class, stressed out beyond belief, feeling that every time I speak to anyone I create a hole deeper for myself in confusion.  Every time I convey my feelings, I am told how wrong I am to think this, to say that, to do the other thing.  I am told it is wrong to feel that way.  Then someone parrots, feelings are never wrong.  Sure: I guess except when it comes to me.  Oh wait, I suffer from terminal uniqueness, or so I am told.  My life has become a parody of slogans: a template for 1984 several years too late.  Now I sit in class, such a privileged girl I am I just don’t know how good I got it.  I am sick of speaking to others to avoid some pitfall that others have told me exists just to create a deeper grave for my soul to lie in.  

This is when it begins: the notebook that sits in front of me is supposed to contain be filled with the wisdom of the ages.  I am supposed to focus, focus, focus: but I feel so whiplashed I can only think enough to manage to get myself up and to here to begin with.  Focus on the class, but the class is another joke that has become my life.  I look at the blank pages in front of me, and it begins.  If no one is going to listen to me, to hear me, I may as well hear myself.  I begin writing diligently, and anyone who saw me in passing would say, oh what a good girl she is, writing away.  But no: it is a link to my own survival, because without this definition that I create on this page, I cease to exist in all the mantras and criticisms and cuts that are intended to mold me into the perfect image du jour that someone passes off as truth.  My own truth: I pour it out on this page, and will do so for the next months ahead, a refuge of sanity when the blows come so fast that I lose my breath in suffocation.  

I am told over the course of this time: stop writing in it.  As though my own thoughts were worthless junk that only led to some other person’s definition of dysfunction.  I say no by continuing.  I take the notebook everywhere with me, and it becomes a character in the massive drama that seems to unfold around me.  People ask if they are in there, and they probably are.  I write in it in front of friends, lovers, foes alike: it creates a web of a narrative that without it, I would be at the mercy of being defined completely by the opinions of others.   I create a core within me by allowing the truth of myself to come forth.  

It is not the healing that others want for me.  They want smiles and bubbles.  I do not want to be good; I want to be whole: aren’t you glad I am putting my college lessons to use?  And what of it: I always wanted to be a writer anyway, supposed to write what I know, charity begins at home and so forth, why not begin in the home of my own thoughts?

I create a self by the words I write down.  I create a reality by saying the words I write are as real as the dictates thrown at me.  It is a weapon I wield to defend the soul I really am, and when I write them, the truth I am becomes real.  The challenges, they still come at me, fast and furious: but in the end, my pen creates my reality, and nothing in the outside world gets to change that for good.  I create my own victory; this success is mine alone.

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