Write about something you don't remember.

Prompt 1: Write about something you don’t remember.

As children, there are a lot of things we don’t remember. As we grow older, there are so many things we forget. I often forget the things I need to do, so I write everything down religiously. I write it on my notepad when I’m preparing for the next day, I wrote it down on my evernote so I know to do it the next week, I write it down in my phone notes so I remember to say it to the person it needs to be said to, I write it down on my Trello so I know I need to do it in the coming weeks, I write it down in my email if I know I need to remember to do it. There are so many outlets.

But when we’re young, we journal and write about the things that need to be written about - usually they’re romantic - about our crushes, the things we’re frustrated with, and often the things our developing brains can’t fully comprehend. Sometimes though, even though we’re wiser now, I think we were smarter then. We had an audacity and naivete. We wanted love and attention - the needs not yet muddled with the anxieties of the future. The excitement of possibility didn’t fully exist though, did it? Were you taught the excitement of possibility of the future? When the future looks so grim, I don’t think that’s something you feel excited about. But overall, if you’re lucky, you learn to pull yourself out of it. You learn that there are brighter days, that it will be okay. 

Because if you’re no longer jumping out of bed, excited for what it is to come, there are two things your body is trying to tell you. The first is that something needs to change. The second is that time will heal. It’s hard to make sense of emotions - why we feel the way we feel, mostly because there is so much that we don’t remember about our past. Perhaps it would be easier if we could link our current state to the experiences we once had, but at the end of the day, what is now is what is reality. The past experiences are information - things that can inform us about the ways we’ve once operated and the reasons why. 

In many ways, they do dictate our destiny if we let them, but the important thing to remember about the future is that we make the choices, minute by minute, of how that future turns out. There is no destiny because it is all about perception. It is the decisions that we make on a day to day basis that dictate where we are going, and the stories, the information we have collected from the past are also all signals to teach us lessons of how we can decide to create a future that serves us. It can be painful, it can be exciting, it can be inspiring. It can be what we choose it to be, because at the end of the day we are the painters of our own canvas. We pencil in the details, we paint the landscape, and take out what we know, deep within us, no longer belongs. This is how we write our story.