A star!

I've been in cleaning mode for about four months now. And sometimes, a lot, that means that there will be piles of almost garbage lying somewhere that things shouldn't be placed. Those things wait in limbo, for me to get annoyed enough to get rid of them, more than anything, because they do not belong there. Before anything gets tossed, I think- Will I miss this? If I get rid of it now, will I throw myself on the ground, limbs flailing in ninety five days when I could possibly need an extra CD book for my potentially new second car for a road trip when I won't possibly have time to stop at a store and spend $4.99? Well, I better hold on to that until I can be good and sure.

Among my refuge in wait, I found a stack of neatly printed writings with my name on top. Packets of three, four, ten pages, stapled together and I finally read through them. Does it surprise me that I blocked out smaller writing assignments from high school? Not really. If I had my way, I would probably block out all four years, the bad, the sad, the worse, and the decent. I wish whoever had assigned these mini-papers to me had required me to put the name of the class on it, or the teacher's name, because I am curious to know who I spilled my guts to every week and why. I wrote about family discord, social hierarchy's, financial strains and responsibilities, the ever-mounding stress of wanting to find myself as a person, student, future member of society.

It was all so serious! I could have written about mounds of goose poop that infiltrated our school field every single morning without fail. I could have written about my gym teacher, who even though she had just gotten married to a male gym teacher, had still wound up putting a rainbow flag on her bumper. I could have written about my always entertaining babysitting perils. But I didn't. I poured my heart out, albeit an adolescent heart pumping with hormones and lack of sleep. And my feedback for each paper was a star inside of a circle. A star. Thank you, teacher of inspiration. You just helped me move some papers into the trash.