Writing Exercises

Someone important to me suggested I try a morning writing exercise where I take 30 mins to write about anything on my brain.
I got this suggestion 3+ days ago and this is my first time writing via my commute on the train. Idk that mornings work for me. I just sat here for 2 stops wondering what’s on my brain, where as at night or the middle of the day I can go a mile a minute.

I have been hyper analyzing myself lately. When I have thoughts I look for someone to call and tell but I don’t write. And telling someone on the phone is unsatisfying yet it quiets my brain enough to wind down. My head is full of so many thoughts and tasks and wishes all the time, sometimes it’s so full I cant sleep.

Writing to do lists for the next day usually helps but I’m embarking on a project that is requiring me to get in contact with a high school Stephanie. I need to search deep into my memory to recall some thoughts and make sense of some artistic choices I made.

That’s why I got the recommendation to write, so that I may be able to recall past thoughts easier. Makes sense I suppose.

I’ve been excited yet afraid of my medium account. A friend suggested I should just let it be what it wants to become yet I remain apprehensive about posting pages like these that feel mid thought and inconclusive. But I need to remember why I started blogging years and years ago in the first place.

I started a blogger my freshman or sophomore year in high school at the suggestion of one of my brothers because i complained that no one listened to me. I was bottling up things, let’s be honest I had been bottling things up since I became an only child at home in the 6th grade. I took his advice and blogger was my outlet. It was for years on and off as I needed it.

My semester of undergrad I spent in Lacoste, France and took a travel photography class that required us to blog. It was a nice combo of free-form and art and plenty of intent to build a particular audience. I’ll be honest it turned my blog into homework and then a bit of a job. I maintained it past my time in France and into my period of time working on the cruise ship until I just stopped all together. The tumblr blog became a landing page for instagram reposts.

I never stopped writing though I just stopped writing publicly. Phillip wrote me everyday I was on that cruise ship almost 2x a day and I wrote him back in extreme detail. Unpublished letters I’ll do something with one day maybe…

At any rate, I returned to writing publicly when I created a medium account just to address that article that had come out about college students and mental health.

And since then, I have still written here and there but by over curating myself I’m burdened with excess thoughts, half written drafts and no more medium posts. When I was a nobody I guess I was a little more fearless, but as an adult I’m a nobody trying very hard to be somebody. As I sort through myself I hope to be a bridge to someone caught in their own thoughts as well.

And with that I vow to not fret the curation of this medium blog and to let it become what it wants to become. I want to be a transparent and vivid bridge, not a picture of some fancy bridge. I want to be reliable and perfect in my imperfection.

And at the end of the day these are all just writing exercises to get to one of my goals, I want to publish an auto-ethnography.