I love writing, and I did even when I was little. I remember first learning how to write my name and sitting at my small bedroom desk practicing it over and over again. As I got older I would sit at our family's ancient PC and write stories about woodland creatures and strange adventures. But there was one thing I never really liked — journaling. I always saw it as a chore. I could sit, notebook in hand, and be utterly bored out of my mind, recalling everything I did during my day. Some days I gave up, and others I did write, but I was never truly satisfied with the words on the page.

Many days it was too hard to relive the horrors of the day, and so I held all my thoughts inside. Kids can be flat-out mean sometimes, and when life got hard, I found myself writing less and less. It came to a point where writing anything was too painful, and so I stopped altogether. I didn't write for a long time.

I started journaling again in high school — not daily, maybe once or twice a month. But I began to appreciate the power of words, and the incredible ability we have to express ourselves outside of what we speak out loud. While writing had been a place of fear and anxiety before, it was starting to become a safe place for me, where my thoughts could flow however freely and messily they wanted to.

Since coming to college, I have learned how vital writing is. I took creative writing with Professor Stevick (a course I highly, highly recommend), and let me tell you, being forced to journal creatively almost every day of the week will tell you whether you love writing or not. For me, I realized how much I missed the art of journaling and how much it allowed me to process everything that was stored up in my mind for years. Journaling didn't have to be a mundane list of the events of my day; I wrote poems, essays, short stories, all of which allowed me to create in a way that brought my jumbled thoughts to life on a page. It didn't matter how great the quality was, I was simply writing for me.

So all this to say, even if you are not a writer, or you hate all things words, I implore you to grab a notebook of any kind, and just try. It doesn't have to be good or even eloquent, just put those thoughts on a page -- I know you have a lot. Even if you fill a page with doodles, it's something. Start. Write for you. Write about anything and everything, because once you do, you will see the writer within that gives you new eyes to see the world. (And you can blame me if you hate it, but you never know until you try!)