Never Mind: Letters I Will Never Send

Writing is my therapy. I write to clear my head. I write to process my reactions and my emotions. I write to express frustrations, joy, gratitude, and wonder. Writing is transformative for me. Often how I feel or what I think when I begin writing changes by the time I am finished because when I write, I am also processing and analyzing and broadening perspectives and shifting paradigms.Here are some of the letters that have been swirling around in my head and heart for many years. The people and events with whom I share this timeline continue to shape the tapestry of who I am, what I believe, and how I act.My memories are by no means comprehensive; I seem to only remember events and words that have some sort of an impact on me. And I seem to remember most particularly those events and words that confused me, caused me pain, or made me ecstatic. So I am recounting those moments in my life when I felt confusion, pain, or ecstasy.I am not a particularly open and expressive person. I leave much unspoken partly because it takes me some time to process events and I would rather give it some thought before saying something I may regret later. My initial reactions are often way off base, perhaps for lack of complete information or an utter dearth of understanding of context or different points of view.In some of these letters, my original interpretation of the events does not hold. I thought I was a hero for Chase; I thought Carly and Ray were jerks; I thought Natasha was weak. I now realize that none of these original assessments were accurate. I believe in cause and effect. I had a theory when I was in high school that we are all like lumps of clay when we are born. The things that happen to us and the words that people say to us cause little indentations in this clay. If similar things are said and done to us over and over, the indentation gets deeper and deeper and the core of who we are becomes harder and more immutable in those areas. These areas become our prominent character traits or habits or attitudes. Heredity certainly plays a role, but we only have control over the environment we provide each other. Many of my teaching practices and philosophies come from teachers I have had, like Ray and Jordan. I learned how to deal with the world through my interactions with (and later reflections about) people I knew, like Chase, Carly, Daniel and Natasha.