I went through my writing stash a couple of months ago. All of a handwritten decade’s worth.

Everything. From the time I was 14 and read that a writer shouldn’t throw anything away because think what treasures it might hold.

Ten folders stuffed to bursting, two boxes, and some besides, filled with all the wild, imaginative ideas and ponderings. The magical one liners and mysterious single sentences, half written hopeful stories, the learnings and the failings, and the never giving up.

I kept one stack. One stack I could hold in two hands without spilling.

It fit so nicely, so . . . small, in that corner of my desk.

A few scraps of notepad paper, a couple of notebooks gone flat from use, and pieces of pages rescued.

I filled a three foot toilet box with all the rest. I tossed the box into the dumpster.

Was I sad?

Would I be staring into nothing tomorrow wondering what I had done?

There was a girl in those raggedy pieces of scribbled on paper. There were notebooks with stretched spirals and torn pages filled with voices and heartbeats made of midnights and the yellow light of a hidden lamp and gel ink pens. Thrumming minutes of inspirational ecstasy, thumbprints of discouragement and utter despair, poetry I’d forgotten I’d written.

I could still see that girl, and all the old stirrings each word had made shimmer.

She was still there, shy, out of place, peeking from behind the pages of the magnum opus’s of girlhood, who could reach out and touch the essence of what made writing life.

I loved that girl. She didn’t know it then. She didn’t know I’d be sitting here fourteen years later wishing I could have her back, if only just a piece of her.

Had I thrown it all away?

It wasn’t like I was trying to move on. Be rid of them. Forget them. I’d held them this long because I loved them. They gave me something to go back to. To smile at. To remember. To give me courage, to show myself how far I’d come.

What did I mean by suddenly throwing them all away?

I say it to myself with a little shrug and tears in my eyes, “I didn’t need them any more.”

Yeah. This from the girl who struggled never to grow up because she didn’t know what lay beyond and so didn’t want to go there.

This from the girl who tossed the stories out, who made room, and didn’t know why she’d thrown all those words away until she was sitting here writing new ones.

Here it’s a truth for me, realizing I’ve come a step forward, and all this meaning is slipping down soft on my face.

They aren’t gone. They are of the sacred place now where all words go that have shaped us and made us. They’ve served their purpose, long and well, and go on thrumming still.

And here’s me thinking someone else’s words are the words that change you. Who knew the words you wrote in a little dark bedroom late at night when you were fourteen could do all this unnoticed, quiet shaping of you?

Some people ask, “Why all these stories and endless words written down? What for?”

I’ve always told myself writing saved me from myself. But now they ask, I can tell them something else, too.

The words you read first did the changing of the one who wrote them.

That is only the very least of why those who wield words keep them always about.

They hold fragments of moments, of the past, tomorrow, and the next tomorrow. Of growing, changing.

Words speak you into life.

Why stop when you have all of time in your hands?