stand up, and live

"How vain it is to sit down and write, when you have not stood up to live." Henry David Thoreau

Someone quoted this to me yesterday, and it made me pause.
Maybe it is vain of me to sit down twice a week and pretend like I can figure all this out, when I've barely lived a quarter of my life. When I started this blog, I wanted to give myself motivation to write. I always wanted to be a writer, but I can never seem to get passed page one. When I was younger, I could do it, easily... I wrote an entire novel when by the time I was 13, about a teenager with cancer. What did I know about cancer? Absolutely nothing. But I guess I was vain enough to write about it. And then I spent the next 10 years learning about it. When I re-read what I wrote, after actually getting to know cancer first hand, I realized how naive, innocent, unrealistic my writing was.
This is probably going to happen again ten years from now, when I re-read my blog posts. Although I am trying to stick to topics I have been through, tested, seen happen around me, it still feels like I haven't lived through enough to preach.
At this age, in this society, we've barely scrapped the surface of what pain is, and yet we already try to barricade ourselves. It's like when you first learn that putting your finger on fire will burn. You try not to do it again. So we try to protect our hearts, pretend like we can control our lives, hoping we'll keep the hurt away. But then we just end up over-thinking everything, letting fear consume us.
So what if we make mistakes along the way? That's how we'll end up learning. So what if we get hurt, scream, feel lonely, get depressed, break-up, cheat, get cheated on, hurt someone, get divorced, cry ourselves to sleep... that's all part of living, right? That's how you know you stood up to live --not hiding behind your words, letting others do the living, and living vicariously through them. If we never cry, we'd never laugh.

I want to be writer --but first, I need to live something to write about.