Draft

I have posted a lot here in the almost year I've had this blog, but I have also not posted even more. I have so many saved drafts, drafts that are meaningful and well written. Drafts that are well spoken and well meant. Drafts that some people would misconstrue and think things which they were not meant for.

I keep these drafts here on my little blog roll, as a reminder that I cannot always say what I want to say. That I cannot always show what I feel to the world. They sit here, silent reminders of unspoken words, exactly as they should.

Writing is one of the greatest things ever invented. When I was young, I read and read and read. I couldn't get enough. It was as if I had this thirst, this dying thirst that could only be quenched by more reading, but no matter how much I read, I could never get enough to truly feel satisfied. Words did this. Writing. It captivated me. It held me hostage in lands unknown. It let me be a princess from under the river, a girl who believed in fairies, a boy who was a wizard, a girl who swam in the ocean every day, a man who lost his way, and million other things. In the summer, I would read all day, and not come out of my room unless forced. I would finish the summer reading club from the library in a week. I would usually read my summer reading from school multiple times before the end of the summer. During the school year, I would get in trouble for reading during class. At night, I would lay in my bed, almost always with a different book from the night before, and read until my mom would come in and take my flashlight away. I would promptly steal it back from her inadequate hiding place the next evening and the cycle would continue, until I was out of high school and could read to my hearts content in the brightly lit common room of my dorms. Somehow, this took the excitement out of reading, or maybe it was the massive textbooks that replaced my massive novels. I'm not sure, but at some point, reading for leisure kind of left my life. It is slowly finding its way back in. This makes me happy. This makes me whole. This makes me Sabrina.

Anyways, I had a totally different point here, so here we go. The other night, we had a ward dessert night, and we had several people over to our home to hang out and eat. We were talking about books we read when we were young, and they were talking about The Giver and how they all thought it was the oddest book they had ever read. I was baffled. The Giver is only one of my favorite books of all time. It makes 100% perfect sense to me, and I understand so much the Author was trying to say. In thinking this over, I wondered how much of what I understood was what the author meant. I realized that perhaps it was very little, and everyone else was right, that it was an odd book full of things that no one could ever comprehend. And then I was reminded of my freshman english teacher. I had the same english teacher from 6-8 grade. I had a different teacher from 10-12 grade. I got along swimmingly with both of those teachers. But my freshman english teacher was different. We didn't really get a long, but she was one of the smartest women I have ever met in my life. She knew so much about the english language, and even more about books. It was her that opened my mind to many great works, and it was her that opened my mind to differences of opinion. We would speak for entire class periods on how one person viewed one chapter differently from everyone in the class. She said something that has always stuck with me. (this is there abouts what she said) "A writer writes only what he or she thinks and knows and feels. If they write anything else, they are a fraud. And while they may be the only one who truly knows the meaning of what they wrote, others can glean what their own feelings and thoughts from it. This is what makes writing truly unique. The unique quality of it being misconstrued, misunderstood and misinterpreted by every reader in a different way makes it a kind of beautiful lie. A lie that each person takes for a truth and holds close to their heart, weather that truthful lie is what the author meant it to be in the first place or not. And no matter if the author is alive to negate their opinions or not, that opinion, to the reader, will never be wrong. This is why writing is so important in our lives, and why we are fools to think that what we write and what we read do not affect each person differently."

I love this. I love that even if what I think about something is wrong, it is still a truthful lie to me, and can never be taken away. At the same time, it makes it terrifying for me to put things out in public, because while it is beautiful for me to take something different from what someone else has written, it is tragic for people to do the same for something I have written. I am going to try to be less afraid. I am going to try to let people make their own truthful lies of what I have written, and not worry if they, by association, view me as less of a person. I will speak all my words, I will write them for all to read.

The end.