What's black, white, and grey all over?

“All great discoveries...are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.” 

- Mark Helprin

Today I made a pot of coffee but I forgot to pour the water from the pot into the reservoir. I got angry, unplugged the whole device and walked into my room before I realized what I'd done. How I was, in fact, angry and disappointed and upset but it was because of something I hadn't seen all of the way through. I'm sure you can weed out the metaphor here.

I've been feeling angry. Disappointed. Upset. Frustrated about a lot of things lately. And the act of being constantly let down is exhausting. But what do you do when you're constantly being let down by yourself? You can blame other people, surely. Or you can accept that the circumstances you've stepped into are in fact that: circumstances that you have utterly chosen and accepted and allowed.

Normal doesn't exist except at the most base and personal level. You create your own version of normal, and if that version of normal feels abnormal then it's your job to change it.

I was recently voicing my frustrations to a friend and they told me to make a T chart which I inevitably couldn't complete.

I found that too many things fell somewhere down the middle, in a grey area. Everything at the cost or exception of something else. Everything had a subtle "but..." at the end.

And I guess that's when I realized that creating some neat and tidy pros and cons list is just ... not conducive to making a life worth living. It's conducive more to bulldozing the life you have and starting a new one.

But I'm more interested in investing in what I've already got -- the foundation is good, it could just use some touching up -- instead of scrapping everything because I lost my job, or my mental health is a little in flux, and my boyfriend and I argue about stupid things.

Instead I'm more interested in going into my proverbial house, fixer upper though it may be, and repairing it one room at a time. Until, with it, my confidence is rebuilt and everything else falls into place.

Lovely: Here and There
11 years of fiction.

Chapter 3

Some say it’s pretentious, some say it’s just our generation, and maybe they’re right and the truth is I care too much about the perceptions to pursue writing properly. That's why I'm not okay passing the same judgments on fellow writers, generational categorization aside.

I wrote my first novel with my best friend Hannah in a dimly lit bedroom on steno pads when I was 9 years old. We huddled on the brown carpet, backs to metal frame bed. It was our secret, and our greatest accomplishment. We continued working on this novel until we were eleven years old and collected some five or six notebooks.

In the seventh grade I’d copy it all onto into a Word document instead of doing math homework. This is a decision I’d regret in college, but that’s a story for another day.

We’d created some 500 pages of pure, relatively cohesive, fiction. It was about two best friends, a blonde and brunette, who shared a creepy resemblance with their creators. The difference? They fought crime. They saved litters of kittens from creepy scientists who wanted to use them to rob banks, they saved handsome boys from Chinese panda smugglers, and had super cool (pink) gadgets.

I started a daily blog when I was 12 that spanned four years, and people actually enjoyed reading it.

When I was 13 I met Alyson, and we wrote short stories and convinced our parents to print them on their computers. We poked holes in the sides, bound them with ribbon, and stuffed them into manila envelopes. We spent our Christmas and birthday money on postage sending them back and forth to each other and editing each other’s work.

When I was 15 we got smart and started sending USB ports with our typed work instead. I still don’t know why we never just emailed them to each other. It was probably because our work was super top secret. Or something.

I once spent 12 hours on the phone with my friend Anna in Kentucky during Christmas break planning, writing, editing, and compiling our collaboration on a fantasy trilogy. There's a blog dedicated to it floating around the universe somewhere, and files on an old computer with more than 70,000 words we wrote over two school breaks.

So when I’m sitting in Starbucks and Mr. Thick Rimmed Glasses types away at a novel while I serve him coffee, I don’t get judgmental. I don’t think to myself that he’s a waste of time or breath. Because I don’t know him. I don’t know how long the urge to write has been flowing through his veins.

And hey, at least he’s doing it. I have a computer full of stories, prose, poems that I wish I had the guts to compile and release for someone else to enjoy.

Until then I pursue journalism, and I write stories about real people and real events. Maybe one day I’ll find a home for all of the other stories in my head.