~For as long as I can remember I've had difficulties getting the words in my head to come out, travel down to my fingers, then end up on the page. My mother was told by my grade school teacher that I was a Perfectionist when it came to writing. At eight years old I was a perfectionist. Wait, what? At that age I shouldn't have been worrying and stressing about what people would think of what I was writing.

Will they think I'm stupid?
Will they laugh at my thoughts?
Have I written this sentence/paragraph in the grammatically correct way?

It wasn't until I was in my late teens and properly diagnosed with all of my mental disorders did I finally come to understand why I did what I did when I was so young– It was a form of self-injury. I would stress about what I was writing, then I would find errors in the notes and berate myself for them…”See? Look at the mistakes! You're so stupid! You can't even spell, let alone form a proper sentence. Just throw it out, nobody wants to see that mess.” Because of the self-berating I would work myself into such a sad rage I would tear up what was written and take a zero on the writing assignment. It was after I did this publicly in class that my teachers started catching on and taking my scraps from the waste basket to read what made me so upset. Apparently I wrote very well for a young child and had no reason to be so hard on myself.

The reason I put that little story in the beginning was to remind myself (and show others) how far I have come. I still have a hard time getting the words out onto the paper, but I'm not going to throw these writing away. It took me 20 minutes to write this. I feel accomplished…and with shaking fingers I will click the Submit button and try to not have a panic attack which would result in my deleting the whole damned thing.