Just Thoughts

So as most of you know, or do now I guess, I'm a junior in high school, and not going to lie, it's a little stressful. I take ten classes, six in school and four at a local college where I study music. I love everything I do, for the record, but I realized that I haven't been writing as much as I usually do. 

So I opened one of my notebooks and tried to pick up where I'd started. But the thing I didn't realize was that after you don't write for a while, sometimes the voices fade. The characters that took root inside your head aren't there anymore, and with them gone, there aren't any words to write. 

So I sat at my desk for a while, holding my pencil, staring at the page where I'd ended on "What?" as part of dialogue. I couldn't hear the characters anymore. 

It was just radio silence. 

And while I'm working on other projects, like short stories, this was my next novel project, but with so much neglect the characters wandered off the page. I'll finish the novel, I know that, it's just writers block, but in neglecting my writing I neglected the only outlet I have for all my thoughts and emotions. Music even has become more a job and competition than an outlet, at least at the moment, but writing has always been something that I could turn to. 

So instead of writing, everything started to accumulate in my head, and it's not exactly the best place to be right now. It's funny, I sound like one of my characters. But this is why I did this, because I don't usually share about myself, I don't like to, I keep everything to myself, or hidden within characters. This is like writing through a character lens, just without the shield of a character. But at the same time, it's still like writing through a character. Forget that it's me, and boom, it's a character. The character of my next novel. It's them, not me. See? Now I'm writing through a character lens. 

But that is a tangent for another post. 

Anyways, being a writer in high school, even a writer in any kind of life where your career isn't just writing, is stressful. But because my experience deals with high school, that's what I'll focus on. I think as teenagers, we forget to prioritize, and we lose sight of things. Being a writer in high school is stressful, at least for me, because a lot of the time it falls second to my school work and my music, and really everything else. I tend to forget that, at least for me, writing is just as much of a priority as my school work, if not just for the sake of maintaining my sanity. I think that could really pertain to anything, because I feel like in high school we lose sense of our priorities, like the ones that don't coincide with school or extracurriculars or sports, etc., so we don't label them as priorities, even though they are just as important as anything else. Maybe they aren't important to everyone else, but if they're important to us, they're just as important. I think that's important to remember. When I don't give myself time to write, regardless of what kind of writing I'm doing, I let my thoughts get out of check. I let my anxiety and stress run wild, and I forget that there are other important things in life than school, or academics, etc. I let myself get sucked into a vaccum, and through writing I pull myself out of it, at least for a while. 

But speaking of priorities, I have to finish my homework, so this'll be it for the time being. But thank you for letting me go off on a tangent for a while. I made a blog on my website, so I figured I'd use it to blog, rather than just post work or announcements.

Thanks for reading, 

- the voice behind B.C. Hedlund