It’s nine o’clock and I am getting some alone time. A break from the stressful morning. At around 6am Frederick woke me. That seems his usual wake up time these days and it’s setting me up for grumpy mornings, not rested fully. When I got down to the living room, I let Jupp catch some sleep upstairs when all I wanted was to sleep myself. At 7am Frederick finally urged me from the couch and I made breakfast for the kids and myself. After some tidying up in Hermine’s room and putting Frederick down for an early morning nap, I get to have some tea. By myself. In peace. Until Frederick wakes up and Hermine is done with her first zoom, that is. 

Meanwhile the blog is coming together during hastened periods of time that I get to have to myself. It’s never enough time. Putting content on the blog and finalizing the design is one thing, and there is also the side of making my blog more accessible to a broader readership. I am learning a lot, but some of it is also clouded in my limited grasp of the internet and how algorithms work. Having my own domain now and quite a bit of help from Jupp on how to use it best, I feel more like a writer. Again. Now that I allow writing to have this space in my life, it urges more to the surface again. Words want to be written, thoughts and emotions expressed. Sentences captured and collected. I remember it well from the last time I felt like this. Probably more than once since 8th grade. 

But being in this writing space also reminds me of how fickle it was last time and how the words fled me and my scrutinizing eyes when I attempted to perfect my writing. When I tried to control every minute detail of every sentence. I ceased to be a writer and became frustrated instead. Dreams of becoming a journalist stopped being pursued. I was participating in a group at my school where we were tutored for Jugend Schreibt, a program in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for up-and-coming writers. The moment I received negative feedback, I curled up in my snail house, not resilient enough yet to learn from my imperfections. And when a friend of mine dropped out of it, I got cold feet too, being two years younger than all the other students.

I came to learn that writing cannot be forced. Not from me at least. I had to write about something that urged to come through me rather than me plotting what and when and how to write. And so I thought that I’d better be keeping my writing to myself as it was a little unpredictable what I could produce. Afraid that sharing may lead to someone saying that I’m not fit for writing professionally. Which some did anyways, claiming that writing was only an outlet. They could still see me write a lot. I felt misunderstood. The death that occured in my poems was meant as a chance for rebirth, for another step on the swirl through stages of consciousness. There had to be something after death, at least metaphorically. How else could I fathom death? Instead of the chance for rebirth, starting anew with the sought out change, some thought that I was talking about suicide. And there was a time, 7th grade, when I dared to dress in a black crinkled blouse with ruffles on its sleeves. I put on dark red nail polish at the same time. When a classmate asked who had died, I felt judged and intruded upon. If only they had known. Instead of standing my ground, I made sure to only wear that black blouse without nail polish. In fact, I stopped using nail polish altogether. (Not that I was a big fan anyways.) How strange that what was only a choice of fashion from my side got interpreted as me being drawn to death, this looming shadow in my past. I was not. 

During that time I wanted to become a photographer. But I was told that I would need to be good at science in order to take pictures. Math and science were the subjects that I struggled at in school, so photography was deemed as inappropriate for me. 

Another feather of a mourning dove just landed on our patio, right next to where I am sitting, typing away on my phone to make the most of the little time that I have to write. I don’t like mourning doves, but maybe they have a message for me, as there also flew a feather from the right side to the left right in front of me when I was journaling the other day. Putting my restlessness and frustration pen to paper helped loosen up most of my body’s tension. My curiosity sparked by a jumping spider, probably a male phidippus adumbratus. A creepy little fella, with a red carapace on his main body. His other body parts zebra striped, covered in tiny hair.

Anyways, back to writing. With the blog coming together, many of the emotions of my early teenage self haunt me. Sometimes I am wondering if by developing my writer self, I continue at that age. 

Emotionally more mature than most, I didn’t feel like joking. Classmates perceived me as angry and unapproachable, when in fact I just wanted to connect on a deep level and have purposeful friendships. I simply couldn’t connect to the lightness of first dates and meaningless conversations and trying alcohol for fun. To me everything was serious. How was I to take things lightly when life meant that my mother could die before my ability to remember her? 

I found a friend whose dad had taken his own life. Finally someone I could talk to and someone who would get me. We became close friends until a few months later he abandoned me. He stopped talking to me from one day to the next, which is torture when you are also sitting next to each other in the classroom. When I asked him why in my early 20s, via a message on facebook, he couldn’t give me a satisfying answer. His apology gave me some closure. 

As a teenager, writing was a tool for self-reflection and a means to figure out which emotions moved me. And they always moved through me with a rapid force. Oftentimes I would try to remember a few words to be able to put the worlds behind them pen to paper once back at home to journal. For the shame of these emotions and my way of expressing them I decided to throw my teenage journals away a few years ago when my dad moved out of the apartment where we lived. 

Words would carry meaning. A lot of it. I ascribed so much meaning to words, for there had to be truth. Somewhere. Something that was the way it should be. I held others accountable to their words and was disappointed so many times when they broke their word, not even promises. While others made typical teenage memories, I kept a collection of beautiful words and phrases in a small journal. In alphabetical order. For at least the words had to be in order amongst the chaos that were my emotions. In another journal I accumulated quotes from writers that spoke my language and seemed to understand me more than any living person. Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, the poets from the Romantik era were the ones I turned to. I was seeking beauty in sadness, and found loneliness. 

Fast forward to my last days as a 30 year old, not lonely anymore; the charger of my laptop broke a few days ago and while I am waiting for a replacement in the mail, I type away frantically on my phone. Nursing my son, who just awoke and who will let me write a little longer when he is comforted by my breast. I even let him share some milk with his stuffed fox. 

I am finally able to crawl out of my snail house again. Tentatively, I have dipped my toes into sharing my work with people that I know love me and now can take it one step further. 

I am finally brave enough to evolve on my journey as a writer and share.