Writing with Rox WEEKLY—But if you try sometimes...

I cannot tell you how many times I have written about my first concert—The Rolling Stones—since the long ago day in 1980 when I was ten. And I cannot  tell you what joy it brings me every time I write about it, despite it not being a very pleasant evening. I could write about that night a million different ways with a million different details and it would still make me smile. 

I don't know why it happens every time, but it does. I mean really... what's fun about the 1980s anyway? What's fun about feathered hair, the LA Coliseum, the nosebleed seats, the drunk, raunchy Dead Head who squeezed my ass on the way to get Nachos, the roach my boyfriend's mom passed us in the limo, the puke in the gas station outhouse on the way there? What's fun about waiting for your preppy boyfriend to kiss you all night, the loneliness of coming home to an empty house and having to kick in the door, shirtless Mick Jagger in lemon yellow tights worming around the stage, and the foreboding echo of You Can't Always Get What You Want careening through your innocent, almost adolescent mind?

But never mind what I wrote. My-soon-to-be-famous-in-my-opinion students wrote about first concerts put on by their kids, the excitement of an upcoming Dessa concert, Bon Jovi, the bittersweet memories of listening to records of Judy Collins and Bob Dylan... As we listen, we relate; we laugh, we long, we regret, we remember... our hearts beat a little faster. We might cry. But why do we bother with all this? Aren't there better things to be doing with our time?

But somehow when we write and share—for better or worse—in addition to making us stronger writers, it feels good. It's deeply satisfying in ways I will never understand. It's fun! We can reframe old stories and take control of new ones. It's a deep cleansing, honoring, and remembering. It takes you back. Or forward. You get to hear yourself again... or for the first time, only with a gentle voice of experience looking back on innocence, on that one evening or moment in time and being able to say to your little(r) self, "hey, I'm back. I'm here. I've been here all along."

And if you do this long enough—this writing and sharing—you just might find...all these years later... you get what you need.

Oh yeah.