Perhaps you have ravenous thoughts. Thoughts that overwhelm and consume your day, like so many flies buzzing around a summer picnic. Perhaps it’s too early to tell what you will make of them.

Maybe you’re prone to writing? Maybe you keep a notebook? If not, it’s never too late to start frantically jotting things down. It’s an effective way of trimming  your internal monologue until it’s nothing but sinew. Don’t worry if they bleed into one another––this is how material works after all.

One isn’t born a writer, one becomes one.

Diaries can become your best friend. No matter how mundane these mental soliloquies are, they are your own, and it always feels nice to have a language, a rhythm, and a currency all your own.

Choose wisely who you share your head with.

A lot of people have a low tolerance for other people’s “bullshit”, as we call it, because it stops us from filtering our own. I find this reluctance to care problematic; it kills your empathy and makes you brittle. If you want other people to hear you, be prepared to listen. 

It’s never annoying to vocalize how you experience the world––as you age, you’ll begin to learn who you can tell what to. 

Yes, your ideas may be sophomoric, and yes they may be self-involved. But who isn’t? It doesn’t matter if there are worse things going on in the world right now, because in this moment, your ribs may be cracking, and you may be bleeding some kind of invisible blood. Take whatever bandages you can.

You’re a teenager, hang on to the feeling while it lasts, because pretty soon you wake up and there’s not as much of a safety net when it comes to things like these.   You won’t have the luxury of feeling lost and aimless (note: you will still feel lost and aimless, but you won’t have the time to admit it to yourself, much less other people).

Care when someone comes to you with their own emotional scraps. You may not have to be the one to sew them back together, but you can perhaps point them in the right direction of some thread.

When you find the person that you can call for at least an hour, who can stare down long tracts of night with you––hold on to them. Make sure you don’t alienate them too much. They’ll keep you honest. 

If your mind is more messy than neat, it may feel like you are the one defective thing in a sea of shiny happy people, but trust me, you’re not. Some of the best friends I have today were the lonely freaks of yesterday––and even through the drama, the upheavals, and rejections, they’ve helped me rebuild a fractured heart more than I ever could have myself. You’ll find them, I know you will.

Forest for the Trees Leather Journal available on Etsy from La Bella Vita, about $41.