The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you." ~Maya Angelou

Deputy D didn't really care for Wordless Wednesday.  He liked the picture I posted, but wanted to know why there were no words.  I referred him back to the title of the post.

This is really ironic considering that Deputy D has some sort of built-in filter in his brain to where he can only process a certain percentage of words during our conversations.  According to him, he listens for key words like "money", "emergency", and "hospital."  The in-between words are apparently unimportant.  I strongly disagree.  It's not just that I am arrogant enough to think that every word I say is important in some way or another, it's just that if I am taking the time to tell him something, than it is probably worth him listening to.

But I guess it's different with written words.  I don't know if it's because he has the time to stop and process what I am saying or just that he can read (or not read) at his leisure.  Maybe, it's just that he really likes my writing style more than he does my verbal style.  Who knows.  Eventually, though, even I will run out of words and I think that Wordless Wednesday definitely has its place in the world.

I love to read and write.  I have ever since I was a little girl sitting on my grandmother's knee listening to her patiently read me story after story after story.  Thanks to her, I was reading way before I started kindergarten, in a time when we did not push our kids to have their college major picked out before elementary school was finished, and reading in kindergarten was not that common.  I spent most of my kindergarten year playing with play dough, putting construction paper strips into Elmer's glue bottles to make it colored, and coloring pictures of the beach.  Oh how times have changed.  Little Man was journaling in kindergarten.  One has to wonder how much a kindergartner really has to journal about.  But I digress.

I loved to read so much, that I often got grounded from reading when I was in trouble growing up.  To this day,  walking into a bookstore and inhaling the intoxicating smell of new, unopened, unexplored books with fresh, crisp pages is one of my happy places on Earth.  I can be having a horrible day, and I can walk into a bookstore and forget everything else going on and be swept away with all the possibilities and mysteries hidden in the rows and rows of books.

It took me a while to realize how much of themselves authors really have to put into books.  Art of any kind is fascinating to me.  But I have a special place in my heart for books.  Writers, even of fiction stories, have put time and thought and little pieces of themselves into every sentence, every word, every character... I believe in the power and value of the written word.

All of this to say (I have warned you that I can ramble incessantly), that not writing all these years since I graduated college was probably one of the reasons it was so easy for me to get all dark and twisty last year. It was easier for me to deal with things growing up when I wrote about them.  It was mostly fiction, as it was easier for me to make up a world and write my struggles into it than it was to write about the actual truth.  Writing short fiction stories about the hapless girl who struggled to fit in anywhere in the world probably got me through the torture that they call high school.

So now, lesson learned,  write I will.  I can't promise that it will always be relevant to anyone but me.  I can't promise that it will always be entertaining.  But I can promise it will be real and honest.  I may not have very many readers, but I know that I have some and that is good enough for me.  As long as someone reads what I write, it is worth it, even if that's just Deputy D.

On a side note, I want to thank everyone for the kind words and support that you showed me after my post on Tuesday.  So many people are going through similar things, and I just had no idea.  I guess it is one of those things that you don't talk about very often.  But now, knowing there are people I can talk to and share with, makes things a little bit easier to deal with.  All of the messages and comments really did mean a lot to me and I want you to know that I value each and every person that takes the time to read my fledgling little blog.