VIDEO: A Project Called *pages

So lately, I have been reading through my old journals. Most of them from earlier on in high school, some from before that.

And though I am still in high school, it is crazy to see how much I have grown since then.

Everything back then was so incredibly dramatic. I swore on my life that I was in love, that I was cripplingly upset. I spoke exclusively in run-on sentences and hyperbolic statements, and, though I cringed at a lot of it, I thought it was kind of beautiful at the same time.

When we were young (or in my case, younger), everything is so big. Every emotion we feel is so out there and so dramatic, and every day feels like either the end of the world or the big bang all over again. Reds are scarlet, and blues are deep cerulean; everything is a poem, and we never shied away from how strongly we felt about anything that happened to us.

We all go through this; it’s human, it’s a part of growing up.

I just so happened to write it all down.

And thus, *pages was born.

It’s an exploration of what it is like to be young.

It will remind us of how naïve and also inadvertently wise we were when we were 12, 13, 14, and so on. I know I, myself, at just 17, am still in that realm of naïvete, and I do not claim to have fully grown into this sagelike figure that can fully dissociate myself from the voice of the past.

However, I think this is important, because though I may be young, someone seeing this may be 25, 30, 40, and they may want to remember what it is like to feel without consequence. They may want to remember what it is like to be engrossed in themselves and their own lives.

Just like how we learn about the perspectives of those outside our hometowns, countries, social classes, or sets of beliefs to garner understanding and acceptance, I believe we can gain a lot from re-learning our past. We may learn how to love, cry, and wish once again.

I present to you, *pages.

 

If you would like to submit a journal entry (or journal entries) from when you were <20 years old, please fill out this form or email me at askabelaangus@gmail.com.