A story.

This is a story. A story about a young girl that was told she was a good writer. What that meant exactly, she had no idea. No one really taught her how to write besides the basics, grammar and MLA format and so on, but no one ever taught her how to reach down into her soul and give words to her thoughts, her emotions... her heart. It just happened.



And the little girl grew up into a woman and decided to be a journalist because she was told, and so she believed, she was a good writer. She thought it would all come easily. That she would be the next great journalist who had the power to give emotion and depth to the everyday mundane events of life, writing the story in the Sunday paper that would make everyone cry. Oh, how wrong she was.



Last semester she met her worst enemy, AP style. "AP style," you say. "Don't be alarmed. It's merely a format." Oh, how wrong YOU are. AP style in journalism is not just a format, it is a world view that forces a writer to see the world in the coldest, most insensitive forms of light. The writer needs only to know who, what, when, where, and why. Sure, they can tell you that the mother was crying over her son's dead body. They can tell you the father's reaction after he found his 8-day-old daughter's body floating in the bathtub, but the writer dare not mention his/her own feelings of sadness, of horror, of disbelief.



So, what happens to the young girl in the journalist who used to be able to give her soul words? She becomes numb. She begins to see things without life or color or emotion. She doesn't even know what her soul is telling her any more, let alone trying to put it down on paper.



This is her therapy. Many will see it as just a blog but to her it is so much more. It is an attempt to reclaim what was lost... or taken. She knows that the 'good writer' is still there. That she just needs to be still long enough to listen, open enough to understand, and vulnerable enough to feel. Oh, and she needs to burn that AP style book.