Ashlee

The year below me in Jr. High was a girl named Ashlee. Now, I am not exactly sure what caused us to start hanging out, but we did hang out a lot. I think it might have started in volleyball - our school had an 'A' team that had all the really awesome players and then a 'B' team that had everyone else. I was on the 'B' team, but I was part of the starting group (as if that makes up for it). It didn't matter really, all my friends were on the 'B' team and we still had fun playing. There were other school's that had 'B' teams, and then there were some schools that just had one team, but they were in the 'B' league I guess ... anyway, we always did well in our tournaments and things so I never felt like we were the sucky ones. But I think that is mostly why she and I started hanging out, and then we just sorta, stuck. She and Lissa and Renee and I would hang out together.

I spent a lot of my time writing stories with us as the main characters. None of these stories were anything like real life - in them we had boyfriends (in real life there weren't any boys to be our boyfriends since we had a severe lack of boys in the school, and the ones that were there tended to be more interested in the 'A' team), and crazy things would happen in these stories like vampires would exist, or there would be witches and curses or one of us would be evil, but which one was it? *dun dun dun* It was good times. Ashlee and Renee also wrote stories in a similar fashion (I don't recall if Lissa did, but she read and added input to all of ours) but I maintain that I started the trend (if I am wrong I really don't want to be corrected on this if any of you are reading this).

We did a lot of fun things together. Unfortunately, I am not sure that any of the stories I wrote exist anymore - our computer at the time was more of a word processor with a screen and it had a big old floppy disk drive, so saving things to a newer format was a bit difficult. Also, I had them all printed off and in a binder at one point, but I gave them to a friend in High School to read them and I never got them back from her. That was pretty sad, but I think I will get over it (in fact, I probably don't want to read anything I wrote back then - it would probably be really discouraging to see how crappy I was haha). I think maybe some of Ashlee's survived though, or maybe even some of Renee's and I would be interested in reading those if ever they were dug up *hint hint guys*

From Ashlee I learned that we are all given gifts and talents (such as writing) and not to be embarrassed about sharing those gifts with other people. It has always been hard for me to share anything I wrote with other people, in fear that they would judge me or tell me it is crappy, (and yet here I am, writing a blog post for anyone who wants to read and I am not even going to edit it!) but Ashlee was never scared to share her stories and she always encouraged me to share mine. I learned that the same characters, and even the same plot-line in some cases, in the hands of different people can become different. I learned that everyone has a different story to tell. I learned that creativity should always be expressed (well, maybe not ALWAYS, but you get my drift right?)