A Force I Can’t Describe
My dad owned a summer camp in northern Ontario when I was a little girl. Ninety acres of vast forest, a beach on a lake that could swallow you up whole on a windy day and nooks and crannies for young writers to explore the depths of their creativity.
It was part of the daily routine at camp to assemble in a hollowed-out part of the woods, where a chapel (no longer in service) sat under billowing trees and reflect. One of the senior leadership team, usually my dad, would lead the entire camp in a discussion about gratitude, joy and the power of manifesting a stellar summer camp day. This small journaling habit that I took up every day for a week in the summer months ended up being one of my greatest comforts as I moved through life. When I would return to my small town, the hustle and bustle of a house with six kids, the terrors of middle school bullies and the ravages of teenage puberty, journaling was my safety net; a space that was entirely my own. It evolved from reciting the mundaneness of my day-to-day to poetic retellings of my deepest thoughts and feelings, visions of myself in better worlds and was a vessel of every pain, sorrow and fear that riddled my young mind.
“You are a born writer,” my mom would say, “gifted.” And yet, for so long, I resisted accepting that this world was my calling.
Often, in math class, science, or the frequent moments of isolation in the schoolyard, I would retreat to my notebook to write short stories. The urge to write was so overwhelming that I couldn’t focus on anything until I put that pen to paper. One morning Madame Benoit (I went to french school) was at the front of our portable classroom talking about division, or the Pythagorean theorem, while I was enthralled in writing a story about two girls who were ripped from their everyday small town lives and thrown into a realm of magic and starlight. At some point, I suppose I was asked a question, and when I didn’t have the answer, Madame Benoit stalked viciously to the back of the classroom, her tired blue eyes and blond-grey bob shook as they took in the sight of my scribbled notebook. I only gulped and didn’t dare meet the stares of my classmates. She screamed so loud her voice cracked from the pitch. She said I was lazy, incompetent, and distracting and tore the notebook from my hands; we all watched as it flew and smacked hard against the blackboard.
There was something in the water in that school, it felt like a piece of something dark and twisted, from cruel bullies to highly emotional staff, but those are stories for another day. The point is, after that outburst and embarrassment on my part, I think something in me should have broken; the drive and intense urge to create and escape into those creations. I should have closed my notebooks and focused on math. I never did, and I never will. There is a force keeping my pen to paper, my fingers tapping endlessly on keys, and my journals filled and shelved by the hundreds.
I don’t know where it comes from, but I’m going to find out.
