Maybe

In my early years, my journal and I had a very special, very sacred bond. We went to school together, we laughed together, we cried together, and sometimes we just stared at each other blankly, waiting for the other to speak.

When you're young and are constantly exposed to negative energy, situations, and people, you learn pretty quickly how to gauge or read people. I often told my journal all about them. Using great details and analysis to sum up why mom and dad behaved how they did, why they never behaved like the parents of Arthur, and how their behavior was not at all similar to what they were dragging me to church to learn.

Being so confused about the different messages and signals I was receiving, I could only believe in myself: I withdrew, so far into myself that I couldn't think of anything else besides the poems I scribbled in the dark at night, the monologues I'd written and laughed at alone. My parents would suddenly "need me" for something, quickly opening my room door. They'd always try to "catch me in the act" thinking I was perhaps watching something inappropriate online or talking to strangers, but all they'd find is me in the nook of my room: reading and writing.

Needless to say, I didn't have a relationship with my mother. She was the woman who took care of me physically, but I knew nothing of her nor she of me. This bothered her. It bothered her so much that one day that she felt emboldened to steal my most recent journal from my room and read it cover to cover. Also, needless to say, she didn't appreciate the author's choices—any of them. She didn't just steal a book. She stole my memories, my secrets, my few friends' secrets, my therapy, my happiness, my purpose—all of me.

There was a lot of "I didn't raise you like this", "you should know better" and all the other things parents say when they're upset because they realize just because you give birth to someone, doesn't mean you know them. She had a point, I watched her argue and fight with my dad for fifteen years, and I wasn't arguing with them so no, I didn't grow up to be argumentative like them. Sorry.

I'm one of those who can't start a new journal knowing there is plenty of healthy paper waiting in the last one, the story wasn't finished. When I asked for it back, she looked at me dumbly, like I had asked her to cook me a quail from her bed. She asked what for.

I told her honestly... "I need it, writing helps me process everything, this is how I survive."

But she just turned away saying, "Maybe you shouldn't write, then."

That 15-year-old girl who had been taking care of herself emotionally, mentally, with no support from family was crushed. I withdrew deeper into myself, but this time with no outlet. Unable to trust she wouldn't steal my things, it wasn't safe to write with ink anymore. I didn't have a phone like the kids in my grade, so I had no one to talk to about how unreasonable my mother was being. How deeply her suggestion to not write had cut me. Writing was all I knew, and my mind interpreted her careless words as, "Maybe you shouldn't live."

And somehow my bleeding heart agreed.

The next few years of my life consisted of me being consumed by the desire to be acknowledged, accepted, and accountable for nothing. Quickly becoming unrecognizable under the pressures of living: becoming selfish, growing deeper into loneliness, and questioning my existence. I looked for help from—who I didn't know, then—my Savior. Thankfully, I mean it took ten years to find my voice again, but I can hear her, can feel the tap on my shoulder as she's readying to speak up again. She's been dormant for so long, but maybe that means she only had so many more stories to tell.