letters to my best friend pt. 2

Hi loves,

You may remember a couple of months ago I made this post called letters to my best friend, where I shared excerpts from emails I’d written that I thought would be nice to show you all, in that post I mentioned there would be a part 2 since I had so many excerpts I wanted to share I couldn’t possibly fit them all in one post and well…hi. Here’s part 2.

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“Something I do realise about myself whenever I’m reading back through old journal entries is that I’m very erratic with my feelings. One minute I’ll write an entry about how much I love someone and the next I’m writing about how distraught I am over something they’ve done and how I don’t think I ever even felt anything for them at all. Upon first discovering / realising this about myself, I wrote another journal entry about it where I said in some ways I’d rather be like that, because obviously I only write for myself and so when I read back on past entries I want to be able to re-live/feel what I did in that moment, so maybe it’s a good thing my feelings are up one minute and down the next.”

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“Even though I feel like I (dramatically) feel things a lot deeper than the other 99% of the world’s population, I am embracing it rather than trying to tone or quieten it down. It confirms to me that I truly was meant to be a writer / artist, whether that is for others or just for myself, whether the whole world knows about it or only me. It also reminds me of all the other great writers and poets that went before us and when I read their work, they too feel everything very deeply and express that in their writing, it makes me feel like them. I really love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and they both wrote in a similar style – in the sense that their words were so dramatic and deep, which makes me feel less silly about expressing my feelings and writing everything that I actually want to, rather than toning it down through fear of how others may react or interpret it. It makes me feel like I’m part of something, like maybe I could understand them in ways others couldn’t.”

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“I think coasting happens when there’s nothing in our lives that makes us really feel something, and by that I don’t mean going out and getting blind drunk so you feel ecstatic. I mean something that really feeds the soul and makes you feel alive – more of an action than a feeling. Something you experience that makes everything different, even something like driving down the highway with music blasting and your head sticking out the window – hair blowing in the wind, or going to a literature festival and being inspired by everything there, or meeting someone that really changes your outlook on life, or going to a new place in the world and experiencing things you never would have before. Something that makes you feel like you’re actually doing something, you know? I think that’s what it means to me anyway.

I know this is weird but that’s why I like YA books so much, some of them make me feel that type of way and elicit those feelings in me – when I think of Finch and Violet wandering Indiana I feel every type of feeling there ever was. I would also like to visit Indiana and go to the places Finch did, I cannot and will not ever be able to describe what that book did to me and it frustrates me because it is the only thing I can think of in my life that I have never been able to put into words. It feels like the feelings and thoughts it gave me and the effect it had on my soul are so other worldly that I’m unable to turn them into something that makes sense in the English language. I feel like the effect it had on me will only ever make sense somewhere else, because it is incomprehensible to the spectrum we’re in now. It is a part of my soul and made up of the same particles of who I truly am inside, one thing I love about the way it was written is that Jennifer references things that exist in real life – Facebook, Virginia Woolf, real poetry that was written and most importantly, real places. I think that’s another reason it had such an effect on me – because she wrote it in a way that makes it feel like it’s real, there really was someone that existed called Theodore Finch and he did exist and he did live, and he did change my life. I feel like in order to heal in any way shape or form I would love so badly to go to the places they did, for myself. That is something I really, really want to do.”

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“For me personally though, home still isn’t a place or a location. It’s a person, a feeling  – a pocket of air space that you’re in when something’s happening and you think yeah, I’m home. This is the only thing my soul has ever known. I’m aware of the things that make me feel like home (through lots of analysing in a desperate attempt to find them again) – but whether I actually will, I’m unsure. The only comfort I can take from it is the thought that maybe there are also more things in life that make me feel like home and I just haven’t experienced them yet but when I do, I will know about it.”

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All my love,

Chloe .xx