I'll Sit Down & Write Here

Giving space for my life stacks.

When I was fourteen, I remember stumbling home from an exhaustive day of tenth grade, a mixture of bored and yearning. I threw up my arms outside our back porch shouting, “ I JUST WANNA FEEL EVERYTHING!”

I’d started experimenting with all of the perceived thresholds - friendships, mini loves, hair colors, confrontations with teachers. I’d implemented long skirts, leotards over leggings (whhhhhy?), and long chunky crystal necklaces into my wardrobe and inched rapidly towards the magenta hair phase. I was still in the throws of my first relationship too. Which was love in the way of being chased down school hallways and berated if I’d fallen short of kissing his ass adequately at last weekend’s party. And at that point, it was still exhilarating.

Looking back at fourteen, I had already “felt” quite a bit of tumult, scraping my knees on the rubbery tile of public school, and all of its hilarious barbarism for my whole life.

So if there was a genie that day - which there was - some lifeforce energy floating around my then toned-down-chopped-ombré style, it did grant me the gift of feeling. And though the past ten years of my life are cornered by pockets of time I wasn’t sure how I’d ever get through, I remain steadfast in gratitude for what the genie has granted me.

And for the past ten years, I’ve been compiling most of it in scrappy journals, or upside down on pieces of assignments I forgot to hand in, and mumbled on quick walks into my voice memos. Substacks isn’t a word I can find in the dictionary, but in its name, I feel the compiled blistering stacks of everyone’s stories here, alive for the same 100 years stumbling and loving and sharing. So what is it all, what are we feeling? Where are we going? Here’s a little sliver of my life stacks, so far.