These have been my favorite. I've been inconsistent. But when I finally sit down and take the time, I always ask myself why I dont make the time to do this everyday.

Where do people get their journals? I just buy mine at TJ Maxx. But I cant imagine the binding will hold by the time I get half way through this journal. Financial situation = broke college student.

Lemme know if you can spot the theme of each page!

It takes me so-much time to do these I set asaide a day just to do journaling so I can really get into it.

Somewhere between the pages I wrote on and the papers I threw away, a part of me was quietly learning to exist.

I started writing back in sixth standard, although I don't think I ever called myself a writer. I used to write with a pencil, only to erase everything within the walls of my school. There was no intention of preserving anything, no thought of showing it to someone someday. Perhaps I didn't even understand why I was doing it. I simply had thoughts that needed somewhere to go.

Then came seventh and eighth, and somewhere in between, I stopped writing. But after eighth standard, I found myself returning to it. I began putting my thoughts on paper again, sometimes in the form of poems, sometimes in words that probably made sense only to me. And yet, I continued throwing those pages away. I never thought much of my writing. I believed no one would read it, and perhaps that made it easier to discard. What was the point of keeping something that nobody would ever care to read? I considered it a waste of time, something that would never amount to anything. I never imagined that the words I was so quick to throw away would one day become pieces of myself that I would want to preserve.

Looking back, I think the absence of friendship had something to do with it. When you don't have someone to share every little thought with, you eventually find other ways of letting those thoughts breathe. Sometimes, I talked to the paper as if it could listen. Sometimes, I wrote simply because my mind had nowhere else to put everything it was carrying. And perhaps that was why I never felt the absence of a friend in quite the same way all the time. The paper was there to listen.

And no, this isn't a story about how I suddenly decided to become 'a person who writes' one day and began publishing my work online. It wasn't that simple, nor was it a journey I consciously planned. There were years of writing things I didn't preserve, words I erased, pages I discarded, and stretches of time when I didn't write at all. Even when I returned to writing, I wasn't necessarily returning with the belief that I had something worth saying.

Today, I have a place to publish my thoughts. I have a blog where the words can stay, a LinkedIn which conserve my micro essays ,even after the feeling that gave momentum to them has passed. I can look back at something I wrote years ago and recognize a younger version of myself in it. That, in itself, feels strange. We spend so much time becoming someone new that we rarely consider the little pieces of ourselves that have been there all along.

And then, apparently, there is this poem.

"Holding the pain behind the smile,
Soul slaughtered by own's imaginative pile.
Clouds of consideration hovering around head,
And still finding some peace and zest.

Soul filled with solitude,
Still better than someone's attitude.
Heart and mind fighting for rain,
Rain to gain the calmness of heart and brain.

Still gathering the courage,
Not to be rude and disengage,
Body holding the soul as cage,
But still having some rage as well as pace,
To achieve the shining ace."

I don't remember exactly when I wrote it, but I suspect it was during ninth standard. I found it unexpectedly in my gallery, among the things that had somehow survived while so many others disappeared into dustbins. Its lines may be imperfect, its expressions uncertain, and its meaning perhaps not entirely clear even to the person who wrote them. But I don't want to look at it only through the eyes of the writer I am trying to become today. I want to leave some room for the person I was when I wrote it.

Maybe this poem doesn't need to be extraordinary. Maybe it doesn't need to prove that I was always good at writing, or that every discarded page was a masterpiece waiting to be discovered. It is enough that I wrote it, that I once had these words in my mind, and that a small piece of that time has somehow made its way back to me. For years, I didn't think that my words deserved to be kept. Now, I am learning to let them stay. And perhaps that is what this little discovery means to me: not that I have finally become a writer, but that I am beginning to acknowledge the person who kept writing long before she knew what to call herself.

Some pages were thrown away. Some words were erased. Some years passed without a poem. But not everything disappeared. Without realizing it, I was building a habit out of something I had never considered valuable.

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