Counting Hours, or Making Hours Count?

Though I have kept journals since I was thirteen years old, I almost never used them to document the events of my life.  They were for what I considered to be more important things—story ideas, poetry, drawings and notes, the raw materials that I will someday shape into art.  My own life wasn’t as interesting to me as those that I saw in books.

When I did talk about myself in my journals, the tone was bleak and despairing.  Obviously I, an awkward teenager, couldn’t compare to the heroes I read about in books, or even to the ones I created myself.  “Every character I write,” says a passage from volume 4, “is essentially based on myself.  And every one grows and improves and becomes someone new and better.  I wish there was someone to write my story, to make me better.  But I don’t think anything like that will happen.”  I was seventeen at the time.

I remember so well what it felt like to think that way.  You never really forget.  But that hopelessness is just a shadow to me now.  My story isn’t dull; there’s just a very significant difference between writing an adventure and living one.  Perhaps these are the years of my life that will be waved away by my biographer in a single paragraph or even a sentence: “There she lived for several years, waiting tables to pay the bills and pass the time, while her nights and her days off were spent chipping out her greater works.”  Simple and brief, except for the one who is actually counting the hours.  My task, then, is to take the happiness and peace that come in these quiet hours.  After all, adventures are rarely all they’re cracked up to be, and no story, however complex, can encompass an entire life.