Revisiting Old Creations

November 5, 2012, I started a Tumblr account called stef begins again. It was supposed to be a 365 day challenge creating one thing a day – for me it was photography and writing – but it ended up being only about 60. It was meant to be a place to create just for myself, but I ended up trying to get others to read and interact with it and they never did, so I gave up. This tends to be my modus operandi. I’ve craved external validation my whole life and even though I actually think I’m a good writer, if no one validates my work, I use it as proof that my lifelong belief is true: I am not creative. Without the validation, what’s the point?

The point is to create something simply for me. Simply because I enjoy it. I can’t force people to read my writing. As Seth Godin says, once you put your work out there, it’s not yours to say what someone else does or doesn’t do with it. It’s like a gift. You give someone a gift because you want to, but you can’t control if they like it, if they use it, or if they give it away to someone else.

Anyway, for some reason, I decided to look at my Tumblr, which I haven’t done in years, and contrary to what I think or the number of likes and views I get, I enjoyed reading my own old writing. So I decided to share a little bit of it here. So here’s a little allegory I wrote when I first started working with a therapist. I’d write these stories, because I couldn’t talk about my feelings, but I could give them to The Girl.

The Girl In The Mountain

One dark December day, a baby girl was born.  Her family lived in a village on a high, lonely plain.  The baby girl was beautiful, with dark brown hair, big brown eyes, and two small dimples in her cheeks when she smiled.  Everyone loved the baby girl.

As the little girl grew, her legs became long and spindly, her nose outgrew the proportions of her face, and her teeth fell out and grew back in crooked and dark.  But unlike the other children in the village, this girl grew very fast and way too much.  She grew and grew until her awkward arms knocked the steeple off of the church and her heavy footsteps made holes in the ground.  Her voice was a loud wail that shook the walls of the village houses.  They laughed at her gigantic size and the way her clothes did not fit, as if they were made for a girl half her size.  The girl cried and begged for the people to quit laughing at her.  She told them she was just a normal girl who wanted to play with her friends, but they wouldn’t allow their children to play with her because they were afraid the children would be harmed.

Finally, the girl had had enough of the ridicule and she got angry.  Very angry.  She lashed out at the villagers and knocked down trees with the swing of an arm.  Her voice became loud.  So loud that the villagers had to stuff cotton in their ears to keep their eardrums from breaking.  

The villagers decided that they couldn’t risk having the girl destroy the village in her anger, so they devised a plan to lock her up outside of town, far enough away that her voice would only be low howl like the wind.  

The villagers told the girl that they wanted to take her outside of town where she could jump rope without destroying a row of houses.  They gave her a long, red jump rope but the jump rope didn’t have any handles, so they had to tie the rope around her wrists.  The girl was so happy, but before she could begin to jump rope, the villagers cut the rope and tied each end to the biggest trees they could find.  The girl became furious.  She struggled with all her might to break the ropes, but they would not budge.  She stomped and pushed with her feet until she drove her feet so far into the ground that the dirt covered her body up to her neck.  The only thing uncovered was her arms.  She screamed and cried and moaned and wailed.  The villagers realized that her cries would still be heard in the village so they took the girl’s scarf and tied it around her mouth so that her cries were muffled enough they wouldn’t be able to hear her.  Satisfied that their problem had been solved, they returned to the village and went about their usual business as if the girl had never existed.

The girl struggled until she was exhausted.  Finally, her anger was spent and she began to cry.  She cried rivers of tears, until her tears started to form a small rivulet, then a stream, then a creek, and finally a raging river.  The river became a wall of water that destroyed the village where the girl had been born.  She heard the cries of the villagers and that made her sad, but suddenly the wind changed direction and from behind her, the girl heard the most beautiful music she had ever heard.  The music moved her so much that her heart began to swell and beat like it would come out of her chest.  And as her heart grew and beat, it broke apart the dirt that held her captive and loosened the trees from the ground so that the ropes came free and she was able to remove her hands from their nooses.  With her hands freed, she removed the scarf from her mouth and she was finally able to breathe again.  She looked toward the village and saw that it had been washed away.  With nowhere to return, nowhere to call home, she turned around and walked toward the beautiful music.