So many things happen around me and all I want to do is write them down. Meeting new people makes you feel certain feelings, compared to already acquired friendships. New people show you that there is so much more out there than you can even imagine. No limits. They also enrich you with great and irreplaceable hope for the future, as well as, instant excitement and intrigue. Yet, no matter how fleeting these new people and feelings are, we have got to remember how things were when we first started discovering feeling things at all.

I remember being in school, not a full-blown teenager yet, and being in class. Sitting mostly in the front rows, didn‘t make me feel more special, particularly nerdy or stand-off-ish. Quite the contrary: All I wanted to be is alert and awake. Be present in every moment and not driff off into daydreaming or trying to understand the world around me.

I specifically remember chewing on my pencils a lot: What that anxiety? Was I in love? Was I nervous? Or concentrated? What was the reason for my chewed pencils and pens, was it a way to process that I was hard-thinking? Or was I just in love?

No, I don‘t think that back then, I was able to fully, or even slightly, comprehend romantic love. I was simply too young and immature to think about such things. The other type of love the chewed up pencil and pen caps represent, is the type of love we most fear of and fail at: Self-love. By chewing on the caps and indulging in anxious and focussed behavior to probably avoid certain intrusive subconscious thoughts emerging, is one way of trying to grasp the meaning of overcompensation in younger years. And thus, actively and silently engaging in what it means to feel or to love oneself. Or just feel that we are alive in which this chewing, until it‘s too gross to chew the cap or end, stands for being present and aware of our actions.

While certain behavioral patterns technically do not need to be over-analyzed, I can safely say that chewing on pens has a romantic connotation for me. Whether you chewed on pens because you were daydreaming about your highschool crush, or you were trying to simultaneously process your maturation, while still being present in class and do your best to keep up, broken ends have something romantic about them.

As always, it is up to us to interpret something into it, or just leave things as they are. At the end of the day, chewed up pens are more than just gross.