Moonchild by Laura

Moonchild by Laura - January 2019 Scholarship Essay

The night is my best friend. On the worst of days, when I feel intensely out of place or like I'm floating passively through life, the darkness wakes me up. The silence envelopes me like a blanket and tells me I’m allowed to exist just as I am. The moon doesn’t judge me.
I think the knowledge that I’m alone - and no one is expecting anything of me - is what gives me the most freedom. During the waking hours I feel chained by what I “should” be doing but don’t enjoy, resulting in bad habits of procrastination and denial. I’m not productive in the night in the sense of doing homework, and if I am it’s most likely editing a friend’s essay. Rather, the night is where I come alive and my passions unfold from where I've tightly locked them up under my rib cage. I feel like I can breathe the second I close my bedroom door for the night. Everything that makes me tense - from family to school projects - melts away.
I suppose the fact that I feel shame for loving the things that have given me the most hope and inspiration in life isn’t the best way to live, but right now I don’t mind keeping my passions close to my chest. It gives me space to grow, explore, and learn without the pressure of a dozen eyes expecting something from me. Although, I’ve found that even during the day no one is really paying attention to what I do. I stress about it anyway, and that’s what drives me to be active during the day despite my distaste for it.
My first love in life was writing, and that is still the only thing I really have passion for and fills me with excitement. I’ve never enjoyed sharing my works with people I know, at the very least I’ve always had to be in a different room while they read my work. What if they hate it? Or worse still, what if they love it? During the day people are liable to glance over my shoulder, ask what I’m writing about, or ignore me. Any one of these situations scares me, but these problems evaporate at night and my true creative potential is unleashed.
I write poems, songs, moral ponderings, and plays. But by far, the thing I write the most are short stories. Always fiction, always set in the present. Primarily, they are character explorations and human relationship based. They ask questions about friendship, love, and achieving dreams that I would never be able to speak about in the day time to any given person. In 2018 alone, I wrote more than 230,000 words on life, fears, and interpersonal struggles. Writing is a release I can only exercise in the dark and on my own. If I didn’t, all the emotions I bury during the day would pile up until I burst, and my dread, hopes, and desires would come pouring out in one big, tangled mess.
The night allows me to take inventory of my day, consider my future, and write about people who are brave in their passions and relentless in their pursuits. They tell the stories of who I wish I was, and maybe one day those characters will walk off the page into the real world, and I will become the strong, independent, outspoken, protagonist in the daylight.