The Girl in the Mirror

Originally, this was going to be posted on Elizabeth's blog, but I decided to keep it :) I promise that I'll still give you a post, Cap'n!


When I look in the mirror, I see a pair of tired gray eyes staring back at me.
I see unremarkable features that are splattered here and there with freckles.
The girl in the mirror has bitten lips from times of either deep thinking or anxiety.
Her hair isn’t soft, it is coarse and brown.

The girl in the mirror doesn’t smile back at me; she only stares, as if asking the silent question, “who are you?”
I don’t say anything because I’m not sure how to answer that question.
The simple answer is Sara.
“I am Sara,” I might say to her. But that answer would not suffice.
There are so many other girls who share my name. So many girls named Sara or Sarah who each have different hopes for their futures.
“I am a dreamer,” I might say to her. But that answer is still too vague.
There are plenty more dreamers in this world. It is not a quality that defines an entire person’s spirit.
If I were to answer her with such a simple observation, she would only continue to stare blankly at me.
But I don’t know how to answer her. I don’t know what words to use, because I don’t know what makes me who I am.
Is it a collection of memories, strung together in a complex pattern?
Is it all of the countless dreams of mine, compounded into one?
Is it the trillions of individual thoughts and conversations that I have had over sixteen years that say, “This is me. This is only Sara.”?
I doubt that I will ever know.

And then, I know what my answer would be.

To the girl in the mirror, with the gray eyes and the bitten lips I would say,
“I am both younger and older than I should be. I never understand the injustices of this world and of this society, but I am almost calloused to them. I am as strong as I am weak.
I am as brave as I am a coward. My voice is both loud and silent.”
“My life is a collection of moments. It is cold grass on my bare feet, and breeze from the river on my face. It is the feeling of being alone in a very dark place. It is lanterns filled with candle light and cool blue water. It is the melancholy that accompanies the reappearance of winter.”
“I am a collage of favorite things. I am a blank paper notebook that waits to be filled with words. I am old, yellow paged books and rusty keys. I am lockets and I am pocket watches. I am dog eared pages and crumpled paper fortunes.”
When I look at the girl, the side of her mouth quirks up to reveal laugh lines from many days and night spent with good company.
She looks as if she’s not convinced, that she wants me to go on, but I do not.

I simply smile back at her, and leave the room.

I do not need to explain who I am to her.

She already knows.

In Between Darkness and Light

Today, as I rummaged through a box of old notebooks and journals, I came across the journal that I wrote in while I was going through my hardest depression. As soon as I saw it my stomach twisted in  knots and memories of the way I felt during that dark point in my life came flooding back.

I knew that the words I had written when I was in that terrible place were gone, burnt to ashes and scattered, but just the sight of it saddened me. 

On the cover, there are vintage looking photographs of faeries, but on the inside there are the torn reminders of what was once held there. 

I remember the day my mother gave it to me. It was the suggestion of my psychologist. 

She told me to write down every bad thought that crossed my mind, and I did as she said even though some were too horrible to think about, let alone document for other's eyes. 

Writing in that journal and letting the psychologist read it was like letting her into my mind, which at that time, was a very dark and dreadful place. 

But today I opened it again. 

Just as I suspected, there were the ink stained shreds of paper along the binding where countless pages had been ripped out. But on one page, there was a poem. 

Something I had written as I was coming out of my depression, but was not yet fully healed. 

Can't you see she's crying? 

She's at war with herself.

Can't you see she's lying,

When she says she feels just fine?

All this time she has been trapped, 

Tormented by her own mind. 

How can you escape yourself? 

Is there any honest way? 

When she cries herself to sleep at night,

She promises herself she'll stay.

No one can ever understand

What it's like to hold her hand

With a dagger at her side. 

When I was in that place, that place in between darkness and light, I learned what it meant to love life. 

It took me more than two years, but I pulled myself out of it. I put myself back into life. 

Now I'm happy, even if I have to fight depression from time to time. 

I'm in more control of my own life now. I don't feel like I'm falling. 

Because when I feel myself slipping again, I know my friends and family are there to lift me up. 

They are there to make me remember who I am, and why I do the things that I do. 

They make me remember my purpose, and they make me feel wanted. 

I love them more than words can express. 

Peace, love, and Minecraft, 

Sara

One Year

A year ago, I began a blog.
The name came from the bad habit I have of falling asleep with my glasses on my face and then waking up to find them sort of knocked askew on the bridge of my nose. It took me several months to realize how close those two words came to summing up a few years of my life as well. From then on, it stuck.

I started the blog with no intention of ever having readers. I figured that I was the only one who understood the things I was talking about and that everyone else thought I was crazy. I also thought that what I wrote wouldn't be good enough to be noticed.

A year later, and I can proudly say that people actually do want to read my stuff as much as I want to read theirs. Having a blog allows people to connect with you on a very personal level and writing about your life (unedited) takes real guts. Thank you to all the other bloggers who decided to take that risk and let the world know you.

In celebration of one year with this blog, something that has become a part of my routine and my life, I decided to share some of the quotes and pictures from past posts.

• When we aren't going by the precise measurement of time, we find ourselves living. 
• I am awkward. And I embrace this. 

• I guess blogging is a lot like writing songs. I never get to choose whether a song is happy or sad, it sort of just seems to choose for itself. 
• That river has been flowing for hundreds of years and when I'm dead and gone, it will probably still be flowing. I don't mater to that river. I'm as insignificant as the little minnows that swim along the banks where the water is shallow. 
• Not everyone gets old. Being old is just a part of the way you think. If you still think like a kid, you still act like one. But you just have to be a more mature kid. 

• We spend our whole lives dreaming, and not enough time living.

• So what if my dreams are far fetched? All that means is that I have ambition.
• My biggest expense has always been books.

• No one  is normal. It's an obvious fact. Normal is just a personal opinion.

Just to show you how far I've come since the blog creation: 

Maybe one of these days, I'll be brave enough to sing in front of people, but today? Not happening.

• There's always hope. Even though you might not be able to envision a future where you're happy, there is one.

• We are all so quick to judge, no matter what we say. We look at people and don't really see them. We see the vicious rumors that people start for the fun of it. But tell me, how much fun do you get out of watching a classmate or anyone for that matter, wither away like that?
• We've all tried to fit in with the wrong people.
• Nothing says conspicuous like a fifteen year old girl dressed in a toga banging on the band room door.  
• The people that I think are the most beautiful, are people who don't realize how pretty they really are. Like my best friend Paige for instance. 

• This blog is definitely not all sunshine and rainbows and glitter. It's the real stuff that seriously gets me pissed off.
• It's not that all girls bother me, obviously. I have some really awesome girlfriends, but I'm talking about the stereotypical drama starters that go through boyfriends as fast as a woodchuck goes through wood.

Remember the first header? Yeah, I didn't think so :)

• There's nothing like having a crappy morning, and then going into guitar class to have your ears start bleeding from how loud the amps are.

• When it comes right down to it, all of us have to just learn to be who we are. During all of that learning and growing, we have to accept that it's really okay to grow apart from the people that are holding you back. 
  It's not that these people are bad people, it's just that, when you first met them you were the same. Somewhere along the way, you just realized that you wanted different things.

• Sometimes, you just have to be made to step outside your little bubble, and go on an adventure.
• Sometimes, we have to fight to live. Even if the only thing we might fighting is ourselves.

• Don't ever let your spirits be broken by your own self. Don't ever just give up because it's the easiest way out.

• If I could go back in time and take pictures of days in my life where I felt truly alive, I would go back to this day first. I would take a picture of me and my grandfather and my brother, standing in the opening of that garage watching the rain. I would take a picture of me and my brother, covered from head to toes in mud and wet grass, laughing like maniacs.

• And when I was up there, I forgot. I forgot about the hundreds of students, teachers, and parents watching me. I forgot about the lights that were blinding me. I forgot about everything. It was just me in my room, singing my brother to sleep. 

Here's to new beginnings and to hoping for another eighty years of documenting all the idiosyncrasies in my life :) And, here's to going back to where this journey began for me.

For those of you who have read the better part of this blog, thank you for being a fantastic support system.

Peace, love, and Point A,

Sara

Newcomers

I feel sorry for all the newcomers in my life. All the people who I'm only just now getting to know.
I feel like everyone should have their own auto-biography that is constantly being written and added on to.
Then, when a person shows up in your life, you could just hand it to them and ask them to read it.
The world would be a much better place.

But where do you even start story about your life? Even when you are as young as I am, there are a million places to start. You probably shouldn't start the day you were born, because nothing really stuck to your memory then. Even the first memory you can remember is usually not very significant.

If it were me, I'd start right now. And then I'd backtrack.

I'd revisit my best decisions (and my worst ones). I'd try to remember my worst days, even though I've tried to block them out entirely.

But all of this is unnecessary, because the point of this post is this: When people first come into your life, they have no idea of your past. They have no idea of the things that have shaped you and molded you into the person you've become.

The people who are worth it will stay with you, no matter what your quirks and flaws might be.
They will come to know you by the way you look at things, rather than by the way the rest of the world looks at you.
People who are worth it, will understand your limitations and help you rise above them.

These are the people who will accept you no matter how complicated your back-story may be.

On that note, I challenge all of my readers to document one event in your life that brought you happiness, no matter how brief.

Peace, love, and documentaries,
Sara

What I Always Say

Every year, without fail, I have ideas for novels. Why? Because I aspire to be an author and my imagination sometimes runs wild. Especially at night.
And every time I sit down to write a novel, I say to myself, "I'm finishing this one, no matter what."
Obviously, I still have yet to finish a novel.

Not surprisingly, I've had an idea recently. And so I sat down and wrote three pages this morning, and that little voice in my head started nagging at me again. "You aren't really going to finish this novel. It'll just end up being thirty pages of crap that you never look at again and just sits there taking up more space on your computer."
And more than likely, that's probably true.

But after reading countless articles on how to stay interested in writing a novel and how to actually FINISH, I think I've come to a conclusion.

My first novel is going to suck.

In fact, it's going to suck so bad that when it's over, I'll probably revise it thirty or so times. And still hate it.

But my goal is this: Finish the damn novel. No matter how bad it might be at the end.

Every writer improves on their writing skills with the more they write.
If I can finish one, then the next one will be easier. I just have to find my system.

Last year when NaNoWriMo came around, I was filled with the idea that I would be finally finishing a novel.
Boy, was I wrong.
I did all the steps. My entire chalkboard wall was filled with my cramped writing and post-it notes. I had the entire outline staring at me for weeks. And it sucked. And I hated it. And I tossed it aside.

So, for the current wanna-be novel that I'm writing, I vow to have a routine.
From now on, Monday through Thursday, I'm writing. FOR  AT LEAST two hours a day.
I just have to grit my teeth, crack my knuckles and fight my way through my first novel.
I've got to realize that it's going to suck horribly.

Peace, Love, and Junk Food,
Sara

Current Song I'm In Love With: 2 Atoms In a Molecule- Noah and the Whale