Thinking will kill you.

Lately I’ve been thinking, and I’m convinced it is the best and worst thing a person can do in this world. Of course, thinking has made life wonderful; where would we be without Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo Da Vinci, and so many other great thinkers of the past? Thinking can solve problems, create beauty, and even save lives.
But thinking can kill you.

Over-thinking will tear you down. It will slowly strip you layer by layer until you’re naked and exposed to your own mind. People drive themselves mad over-thinking. When I find myself thinking too hard for too long, I become a blank page full of scribbles in black crayon: confusing, bleak, incomprehensible is the very worst way. I believe my best friends despise me, and love to see my walls crumble down around me. I believe I will never find love, that I will always be resented, built up to be torn down. I believe the world would be better without me around.
None of which is true.
But my brain doesn’t know that.
Not always.
It’s as though I’m trapped by my own mind, forced to picture things I never want to picture, contemplate things that send shivers down my spine. What happens when I die? Is there a God? Will that be it?
One of my biggest fears is oblivion, and thinking makes me realize how insignificant I am, which is ironic, seeing as thinking is what made people like Franklin and Da Vinci impossible to forget.
But this leads me to my next point.
Life is NOW.
Don’t spend your life thinking about what comes next. A life spent worrying is a life wasted. Life isn’t going to wait for you. It’s going to go on whether you want it to or not. You will never get these moments back. You will never be 16 again, sitting in the bed of a pickup truck, gazing up at the glittering stars with your three best friends. You can either give up and sit ten feet from the starting line and wait for the race to end, or you can race along with life, and stumble and trip over the bumps in the road to victory, and proudly stand at the finish line and whisper, “I made it.” Don’t let a moment go to waste. Seize this moment, because it won’t happen again. Don’t wait for your once-in-a-lifetime adventure; LIFE is a once-in-a-lifetime adventure! Go get what you want and don’t wait for it to come to you. Go out and grab it, and hold onto it for dear life. Don’t think. Just do.

The Joys of Waiting

Elizabeth Fountain, Author

I hate waiting. Most people I know hate waiting. Life is full of waiting: we wait for loved ones to come home, we wait for movies to start, we wait in lines at groceries, banks, or the DMV. We wait to hear the results of tests at school, and the results of tests about our health.  Right now my love is waiting to find out if a new job will come through, unable to make commitments until he does. As writers, we wait for the muse to strike, we wait to hear back about a submission, we wait to see if anyone will discover our work, and we wait to learn if they love it as we do. All this waiting creates an often excruciating sense of anticipation, anxiety, or dread. It puts us in a state of suspended animation, of limbo: we understand, while in this limbo, why Dante…

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Me.

Shooting Stars and Santa Claus.

Last night, I went out with a couple friends. We played frisbee in the park and then went out for ice cream. As the sun began to set, we decided on our next adventure; we drove out to my old elementary school, which is a few minutes outside of town with an awesome playground. We swung for a while on the swings too small for us, and after a while, we decided to just sit in the bed of the truck and talk.

The lights on the outside of the school kept blinking on and off, so we had frivolous conversations in between light flickers. It became an inside joke; the light comes on. “fuck off!” the light goes off. “the stars are gorgeous.” the light comes on. “STOP IT!” etc.

During the moments of total darkness, we became real. The lights blinked out, and our heads snapped up in the direction of the stars. Wesley pointed out the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, and Gene told us how he’d once spotted the international space station, and pointed it out to us using a fancy app he had on his phone. We discussed how we felt.
“I honestly don’t care if I die.”
“I worry about the future.”
“Isn’t the sky beautiful tonight. I wish I could live in this moment, always.”

We got pretty cheesy and sentimental.

During one of those moments, when the only light was the glow of the stars, I saw it.

I saw a shooting star for the first time.

No one else saw it; they thought I’d imagined it. I shouted and jumped up and pointed, but quick as I’d seen it, it had disappeared behind the thicket of trees off aways. They argued that shooting stars last a bit, that it wouldn’t have disappeared so suddenly. I’ve never heard of that being the case, but I refused to believe them.

“No,” I said. “It was the first shooting star I’ve ever seen. And even if it wasn’t, I’m telling myself it was because it was beautiful.”

This made me think- how often do we trick ourselves into believing things simply because we want them to be true?

If you were raised in a home where Santa was not ruined for you at a young age, you probably hit that phase where you began to doubt Old Saint Nick’s existence. How old were you? 8? 10? 12? I remember when I began to doubt the legitimacy of the legend of Santa for the first time. It made no sense, all logic pointed against him. But still, I held on. It was familiar. It was optimistic. Deep down, I knew Santa was a tale that parents had been telling so children would behave throughout the holiday season. But I wanted to believe it was real. I wanted to believe in a person so good and so selfless that they spent an entire night in the frigid cold, delivering gifts to children all around the world. I wanted to believe in a man who was so jolly, when he laughed his stomach shook like a bowl full of jelly. I wanted this, for around the time I began to doubt Santa, I also began to notice that the people I’d once considered heroes weren’t who I thought they were. I began to recognize reality and see the bad in good people. I saw through the veil. I was an outsider looking in, quietly observing my own disappointment.

Even though my parents told me years ago the truth about Santa, each Christmas Eve I lay in bed, excited for Christmas morning when I’d open gifts from that centuries-old man. I know he’s not real, but the magic is real, and the meaning is real, and as my mother once told me,

“Just because you can’t see that it’s real, doesn’t mean it isn’t real in your heart.”

Harry Potter Saved My Life.

I know that if you suffer from depression, you can’t just shut off those feelings (or lack of feelings, even). You feel crippled by your own mind, which only makes you feel shittier. I understand that. But the next time you’re having a really bad day, or the next time you’re tempted to self harm, or the next time you’re tempted to take your own life-

Think about Harry Potter.

I know, I know. Harry Potter’s a fictional character, what does he have to do with anything?

I’ll tell you exactly what Harry Potter has to do with the matter.

When I was younger, I was severely depressed and had no friends. Sure, I had acquaintances, and the occasional “close friend for a couple of months” people in my life, but a best friend that I completely trusted, 100%? No. I didn’t trust anyone at that point in my life. I didn’t even trust myself. I’d tell myself it’d get better, that I’m just being stupid. Just be happy, dammit. You can control the way you’re feeling, you just aren’t trying hard enough.

With a lot of time to sit around and not many people to keep my mind off of things, I spent a lot of time thinking. Sometimes, if it was a good day, it was how lucky I am to have what I have. Sometimes it was how much I hated myself. One day, after a particularly horrible day, where not much happened to me (except my own thoughts), I was going to do something very stupid and very permanent. I was at such a point of self-hatred that I was ready to take my own life.

I was thirteen years old.

Thirteen.

I was so close to doing it when I looked up at my bookshelf and saw Harry Potter. I was absolutely obsessed with the series in middle school. I still love The Boy Who Lived, but I’m serious. It was always what made me feel better. 
That got me thinking about Harry. Harry was just a baby when his parents died. They were murdered by a man who left a constant reminder of what had happened on his forehead (even if he didn’t know it right away). He was then sent to live with his douchebag aunt and uncle, who treated him like crap, forcing him to do all their housework, endure regular beatings from their snot-nosed son, and sleep under a set of stairs. His entire life, he had been treated as an embarrassment, something to be ashamed of, something to hate and keep hidden.

And then he got his Hogwarts acceptance letter.

Upon remembering this, I found the courage to keep living. I thought, Harry had it so much worse than I did, and look at him. He still found a way to be happy eventually. I kept living. And I’m so glad I did.

The summer after eighth grade I went to New York City for the first time, which was basically my own personal heaven on earth, and went to the Harry Potter exhibition. I cried tears of joy when I was sorted into Gryffindor by the Sorting Hat (even though I’m totally a Ravenclaw) and actually sobbed when I saw THE Hogwarts Express. I went to see Team Starkid live and met AJ Holmes and Joe Walker, who did his Umbridge laugh RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME! I got into Doctor Who, which is my current obsession. I went to Chicago twice this summer and saw Book of Mormon both times, which made me laugh harder than every other thing I’ve done this year combined. I got into show choir, something I’d been dreaming about since I was 9. I’ve written essays and had teachers tell me I’ve got real talent, and helped me figure out that, hey, I really enjoy writing. I’ve gone to two midnight premieres and dressed up for both of them, and met some really cool people with the same love of “nerdy” things. I’ve gone to concerts, I’ve found new music, new books, new movies that have changed my life. But most importantly, I’ve found new people that have changed my life.

None of this would have happened had I not remembered Harry Potter.
I would not have found these people that have taken my world and flipped it upside down, and challenged me to be a better person and absolutely refuse to let me think I will ever be abandoned again. They make me smile and laugh and feel like if I were gone, someone would miss me.

Of course, I don’t always feel so optimistic. There are days, weeks even, where I spend the entire time thinking they will never want anything to do with me after (insert minor action I took and then proceeded to overthink the hell out of here). But when it comes down to it, they love me and I love them, and I am so glad they care about what happens to me.

So the next time you feel like the world is your enemy, that nothing will get better, just remember Harry Potter. Remember that even though it could take weeks, months, years even, you will eventually find your own Hogwarts, full of experiences and people that you can’t even imagine ever wanting to leave behind this world.

Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.

The Mason Jar Project, 2013.

This summer, I kept a mason jar with all the fun things I did/happy memories I wanted to remember (AND ONLY HAPPY!). Honestly, I wish I’d written more down. Unfortunately, around mid July I got busy and then eventually just forgot. But then I’d remember and write down what I could.
Today, I read them.
It was amazing.
I read each one and it was bizarre. Some of the more recent ones I remembered quite clearly. Others I’d completely forgotten about. But when I read them, it wasn’t like they were my memories. It was like reading short summaries of someone else’s day. Remembering them felt like a paradox; they seemed like they’d happened years ago, but at the same time, how was that already three months ago? Reading them has made me realize just how much I’ve changed in three months even. It made me realize how much I’ve done.
The last one I read was from when I went to see This Is The End with my friends towards the beginning of the summer (see photo). My (very outgoing) friend Jenna asked a random guy who was obviously on something to put more butter on her popcorn. I freaked out and was horrified but luckily, Jenna survived the almost-poisoning I’d envisioned in my head.
When it happened, it wasn’t something I thought would become a pleasant memory. I was slightly annoyed at the time. But now, I laugh at it. How ridiculous I acted and how random Jenna was, and how hard Madi laughed.
I can never get this summer back, but it was great. The school year has different opportunities for fun, but as much as I enjoyed the beginning of summer, I wish I’d held on to that fervor for the remainder of it. After my second trip to Chicago, I immediately began stressing about school. I wish I hadn’t.
This really has been the best summer of my life. I did more than I ever have in one three-month period as I did this year. And even better, I spent it with some of my favorite people.
I highly suggest The Mason Jar Project. I did it over the summer, but you can do it for anything. Winter break, the school year, heck, just do it over a weekend trip. You’ll be so glad you did. You will look back fondly, and remember the things that made you smile. Keep them for a rainy day when you’re feeling down.
RIP Summer 2013. You will be missed so much.

First post.

So I guess this is my first post… I’m new to WordPress. I’ve been a tumblr user for a long time but it wasn’t what I wanted strictly for writing. If I can figure out how to link the two, I will, but… yeah.

I doubt I’ll ever have any followers (do you have followers on WordPress?), but here’s a little “about me” anyway.

I’m Kate. I’m 16. I sing. I like boys.

That’s about it. 🙂