As a kid, I was obsessed with reading, I would read all the time at any chance I could get. I had this little plywood bookcase with four shelves and I tried so hard to fill it up with books. My parents didn’t really buy me many things growing up and I didn’t get an allowance or anything so I rarely got to add new books. When extended family came to town I would beg them to take me to Goodwill and I would try to get a couple books.
For some reason, I wanted to create the illusion of having more books, so I put my bookcase behind my bed to act like a headboard, that way if someone came in my room they wouldn’t see that the bottom bookshelf was empty. I never have really liked reading books more than once, but with a limited selection, of course I did. I don’t know if having so few books influenced that feeling, but I am still like that, even with movies and shows. Sometimes I wouldn’t want to read the books over again, so I would mess with them instead, I would organize them by color, height, title, author’s last name or first name, the number of pages or a mix of a couple listed. Sometimes I would arrange them in an arbitrary manner of what was ‘best’, best book, best color, best cover, favorite characters or something else equally weird.
My dad is a blue collar worker deep in his soul and always will be. He was never fond of me reading all the time and considered it lazy of me. I have a small dyslexia problem, which seems paradoxical, but as a kid, teachers would tell my parents that my spelling issues and incorrect pronunciation, among other things, would go away with reading. Clearly, reading doesn’t fix dyslexia and with my lack of improvement by dad was over me reading. My mom didn’t care if I read or not, but she didn’t defend me either so my reading time became very limited.
When being mandated to play outside, in the middle of nowhere by the way, I was like a little bottle rocket of rage. I would stiffly walk out of the house refusing to look anywhere except right in front of me until I got out of sight of the house and then I would go back and forth between hot rage and bemoaning my existence.
If I planned it right, I would sneak a book into the barn the night prior when feeding the horses so I could just sit in the barn and read. On occasion, I wouldn’t have anything to read so I would meander around the marsh and forest behind my house. But that could get really boring too, so I started mentally writing my own books based off of things that had happened to me. I would lay in one of our pastures and try to take in all the detail and mentally write a backstory of why I was laying there. That started bleeding into me mentally writing memories. . I would analyze things that happened in my life mentally rewriting the events with clarity and precision. I also created other stories in my head when I got bored of my life or wanted to do something new.
Some memories I actually liked so much that I would genuinely write them down. I’ve gotten a lot better at writing but it was really hard for me as a kid. I would love it if I could find those notebooks.
All of this background is building up to me reading this one book in particular. I don’t remember the title but one of the main characters has a journal that he writes memories in with beautiful detail. It reminded me so much of the things I would mentally or physically write that I felt so validated that I continued to think like that and write like that until it became a habit. I used that book as inspiration to write with better rhetoric.
Moving forward a few years to high school, we had to choose a literary canon author to read. On a whim I chose Ernest Hemingway because I liked his name. I subsequently chose to read The Sun Also Rises which profoundly changed the way I thought about writing. I never had read a book that was written in his style, I later learned he pioneered it. Everything he wrote was so simple and eloquent. Scenes were articulate and emotional in an unusual way and I fell in love with it.
I slowly wrote less and less for pleasure and just for school work. Then I finished school and moved to Maui. I tried journaling for a bit on and off, but that was because I was friendless and needed to pass the time. I loved going to the small coffee shop off of the main road run by a couple Auzzies with great coffee, but the writing, not so much. It wasn’t fulfilling. I was essentially journaling the events of a day in an elaborate list.
I would still think of things in the mental writing like I would like as a kid, but it would never make it onto the paper or even past immediate thought. I was mentally writing the present and then it slip into nothing to be seen again.
Just to remind you of the timeline, last year was a horrible year for me. Amidst all that pressure I was constantly mentally writing memories after nostalgia brought them up. It was an unconscious habit. One night I was thinking of a particular memory about horse riding as a kid and I decided to actually write it out in a small instagram caption. I really liked it and realized I missed that type of writing so I wrote like that a little bit more after a few friends said how they liked it. The encouragement really helped me to decide to write since I’ve always been self-conscious of my writing and historically I’ve struggled to write well.
Then last summer I traveled and Jasmine said that she liked how I wrote my captions and at that point it really sold me on actively trying to write down memories that I enjoy in some way.
I struggle with insecurity concerning the logistics on occasion, but I want to physically write down my mentally written stories. All of this build up is to say that I will be writing down these stories on occasion, an ongoing series of sorts. I’m going to call it snippets.
When thinking about this I wished so bad that I had that notebook of things I wrote as a kid and I imagine here in a few years I will be just as excited to go through these.
Ashley Grace 