24. WRITE IT DOWN - WORRY LATER

I was 13 years old. We had moved from the English Tudor home of my early years to an apartment building at the bottom of East Bruceton Road in Pleasant Hills, PA. Dad was gone for good, and while there was a calmness that came with his absence, there was also an internal heartache I didn't know how to let out. Mom, with her feet finally planted on the spongy soil of liberation, was working at full throttle as a Real Estate Agent. Thinking back on it, for a kid who had the blessing of walking into the house after school, calling her mother's name and hearing her answer from the laundry room or the kitchen, losing her regular presence felt strange. By the time I was a Junior in High School I had a small bald spot at the crown of my head from pulling my hair out. I'm sure there's a medical psychological explanation for it.Pulling those strands of hair was like releasing steam from my boiling brain. I'd come home from school, clutch my ragged Raggedy Ann and curl up in Mom's big white rocking chair and turn on Sesame Street. We know it now as depression, blessedly treatable, but then it was silent internal whisperings of "I'm not well."

At some point, after we had moved to the apartment, Mom gave each of us kids a small spiral bound notebook, about 3 x 4 inches in size, with a small colored pen to go with it. I believe I was around 13 years old then. We had a family rule that when mom said "Lights out" you turned out the light and tried to sleep (usually unsuccessfully.) When she handed us our little notebooks and pens she told us if we were worried about something or felt like our minds were having to remember too much, we had permission to turn on the light and write it down in our notebooks. 

"They're yours alone. You don't have to share what you write. Sometimes our heads and our hearts get spinning, trying to remember things or trying to figure something out or just plain worrying. If that happens, write it down and let the paper hold it so your mind can rest. You can come back and visit it again tomorrow if you need to."

That advice was pivotal in my life. Eventually my filled notebook became a stack of pink index cards bound with a metal ring, on which I wrote poetry. That poetry eventually found its way to the New Era Magazine and afforded me a talent award to attend BYU.

Words became my steam valve. They bubbled in the rising heat of my passion and angst, rising from the boiling chaos and released in droplets dripping from a literary ceiling. I believe it is a basic human desire to be understood. I wanted to be understood, if only by myself. Words were my pallet and the paper at the side of my bed was the canvas. 

When our Aunt Mary died she left a little faded note taped on the wall in her bedroom: "Worry later." 

Gather up the jumble in your head, give it form and space on a piece of paper. Hide it, or share it, or do whatever you will with it, but let the paper hold it for you for a while.

Thanks, Mom.