Yesterday, I was poking around my room a bit. Just a little excavation to see what was buried underneath all my everyday items. Things like macaroni crafts from elementary school, old letters, newspaper clippings, Polaroid pictures. Through this half-hearted perusal I came across a few of my old notebooks, the ones I kept around the age of thirteen or fourteen.
Behind the cover that displayed some white-haired puppy dog and a smattering of pictures cut and pasted from Teen Vogue, I found a few random parts from an unfinished novel. The novel I thought was The One.
While the plot was both random and cliché, the adhesive weak, and the characterization thin, I thoroughly enjoyed reading through those pages covered in my cringe-worthy preteen handwriting and self-righteous edits.
While I stumbled through a particularly watery description, I realized something.
If I had been doing this a year or two ago, reading through old stuff, I would have found it extremely dissatisfying, terrible, awful, all the while groaning while things like ‘were you really ever this dumb???’ inside my brain.
But over the course of this year, I’ve started to realize that I’m not perfect, I never was perfect, and I will never be perfect.
I believe the actual quote from my writer’s notebook is: *wow, I just spent about 15 minutes looking for it…. I really need to do some cleaning…
But it says something to this effect “I really need to stop trying to compare myself to every writer and just let myself progress naturally, life or death passion just kills you in the end”… only more eloquent.
Now that I have accepted these imperfections, I can look back on these well-worn and well-loved stories with acceptance and possibly some pleasure. I’m not ashamed of that thirteen year old Jade, I am grateful for everything she did to get me here.
***Note: I will be out of town this weekend with no access to the internet, so no Sunday post.
Maybe I'll work in a little something special next week.
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