“The life I didn’t think I wanted to live, now something I want to take care of. The ways I’ve changed… I’m not trying to be better for others anymore. I’m doing it for me. This coping way I’ve found – writing. The way it flows. The way the pencil takes control. It’s almost breathtaking.” –Ryn Moon
My story has been pretty sad. I’ve never felt like I belonged or like I was important enough. I’ve struggled with mental health issues and lost a lot of friends. Sometimes you roll with the losses, sometimes they gut you…I’ve gone through the motions, joined groups and taken center stage but I always just felt like an add-on.
When I think back on it, I’m not sure I ever really had a voice to be honest. In my head, the sound rages loudly, but it’s never portrayed to the outside world. Enough time passes, you get used to no one hearing you. Eventually you just figure there’s no point. Just be who they want you to be, pretend you are what they see. Maybe they’ll like you. Maybe you won’t be treated differently from everyone else. Maybe you’ll belong.
Somewhere in all of that “blah,” just struggling to survive the day, I didn’t – or at least key parts of me didn’t. The parts of me that knew that there was something to live for. The parts of me that knew that I had value. The parts of me that wanted to see tomorrow.
I’ve been in therapy – am in therapy, and will be in therapy for… well, a while. But one of the things that has helped me the most in my day-to-day started because I joined a club at Avenue A. I had been to teen night a few times, and kept wanting to join writing club, but it didn’t work with my schedule. When COVID happened, writing club went online. I was finally able to join!
Week by week the prompts sparked something inside me. I started out writing horror – made up stuff that didn’t look like my life at all. But I kept finding myself writing about people and situations around me. About how I felt. About anger and sadness and loss. About me – the real me – the one that I kept trying to bury. I started sharing my writing with my mom and my therapist. They were excited to hear what I’d written each week. I realized that my writing was helping them understand what was happening in my head. In that dark corner that I’d shoved myself in, the real me was talking, and for the first time the outside world could hear me. Things that I couldn’t say in my own voice, I could write down and read – as a poem or a story.
There’s a quote from The Semicolon Project that I like: “It isn’t easy to use your brain logically when it turns against you emotionally.” It’s more though – when your brain is in chaos, and you can’t hear you past the raging sound, it’s impossible to be logical or name emotions or do any of the supposedly healthy things that people are asking you to do. Following the prompts, writing about anything that comes to mind or paper – helps me to let it out, to calm the storm so that I can hear again.
You wouldn’t think that joining a club would help you find your voice, help you find yourself, help you save yourself. Maybe that’s how it always is, what seems like the smallest thing from the outside is really gigantic inside of you. Letting the pen flow across the page…In that moment I write a whole destiny. Sometimes for a character in a story, but these days more often my own.
I’ve been able to find my voice that I never knew I had via writing. It’s still quiet, and still carries a lot of fear that people won’t like the real me. But that’s all I can be – me.
Ryn Moon is a member of the Avenue A Writing Club and in 9th grade