This I Believe 2015

I believe in the power held by blank pages. Some people don't consider writing to be an 'art', because you can't just look at it to enjoy it, you have to read it, you have to get involved with it. You have to become a part of it in a way you don't have to with other mediums of artistic expression. But I think that if writing were a more physical type of art, like sculpting for instance, the blank pages would have the same power, the same bearing, as that chunk of uncarved, unrefined marble sitting, waiting on the sculptor's pedestal. I believe without blank pages, nothing can truly be created, because something can't come from nothing.

If I remember correctly, as I often try to do, it was in sixth grade that I first started believing in the at times mystical capabilities held by blank pages. Of course, I didn't know I had this belief at the time, but it was there all the same. In my experience, there are only two groups that you can fall into in sixth, seventh and eighth grade, and those are the 'bully' and the 'bullied'. There isn't much of a middle ground, unless you are, of course, one of those flies-on-the-wall that no one bothers to pay attention to.

In my case, I was a bit of a mix of the former two. People didn't pay attention to me 80% of the time, and I preferred it when they didn't. Because when they did, it generally wasn't to make nice or be friends. It was to ridicule, to shout and sneer. It was to rake me across the coals whenever they saw fit, for every little thing I did or tried to do. I grew up with this maltreatment at the behest of my peers, and I hate to admit it, but I think I may have gotten used to it, or even began thinking I had done something to deserve it. For most of my life, I was the bullied fly-on-the-wall, a role my peers eagerly assigned me because I didn't try to fight it. This role became one I wasn't able to break free from, and in many ways, I'm still struggling with the after effects of the viciousness my middle school peers treated me with.

But that's where the blank pages came in. I laugh about it now, but my first notebook ever was one of the girliest things I've ever owned and will ever own in my life. My mother bought it for me, but she bought it because I thought it was cute, and whether I threatened to throw a tantrum in the middle of Target or not is open for debate. Regardless of how it came to be in my possession, it had a pink cover that was doused in gritty sparkles and almost completely taken up by a dewy-eyed, white, rainbow-maned unicorn with a blue, crystalline horn. The notebook had seventy pages in total, and each of them was unique, just like people can be or snowflakes are.

Each page had a destiny in store, but they were, in no way, predestined to become a certain thing or even required to remain one thing for as long as they remained legible. There are so many blank pages in one notebook that they can be a million things all at once, all protected and immortalized behind a colorful cover. Making blank notebooks into a melting pot of people, places and things, both realistic and fantastic, proved to be exactly what I needed. The blank pages gave me the ability to create whole worlds only I understood and in a way, create the friends I was sorely lacking in real life.

These blank pages gave me the same power my peers had over me, to give something a role it had no choice but to play. But at the same time, I was free to go back and reassign roles like some sort of omniscient chess master. I wrote many stories during the sixth grade and continue to write them to this day, but my first one holds a very dear place in my heart. It was about a fourteen-year-old ghost named Cerise Abney. She haunted an orphanage, and the story was about her interactions with the different people who lived in her old room. The story was written as diary entries for each new person, and those blank pages were, in some ways, just as much my diary as they were Cerise's.

I have countless notebooks now, and all of them house hundreds of personalities and plot lines that make their once blank pages stand out in a way I only wish I could have. There is nothing better, I think, than feeling that new idea that's been floating around in your head finally start to take shape on a once-blank page.

The blank page is many things, but above all, it is flexible. It lets you change things you don't like about it so easily, and that's what I love most about them. There is no way for a blank page to become something worse. It can only become something better.