Meet Our New Intern: Lyndsey Summers

My first sleepover was one room over from my bedroom. Curled up under the comforter on my sister’s bed, mystical thoughts that could only come from a child during Christmastime swarmed in my brain. Cookies were laid out on a table in the family room. We had celery outside for the reindeer. I think it might have been the only Christmas Eve we actually set food out for the holiday characters.

In our excitement, my sister and I wanted to pull our first all-nighter. All I wanted was to hear Santa Claus walking on our roof. We didn’t have a chimney, but the Santa Clause movies told me that he would make his own entrance. To take our minds off of the wait, we started telling stories. We retold the fairytales we’d always known, but we would change at least one detail to make it our own. We would make up our own Hallmark movies based on the films we watched with our parents. We would take turns and continue our stories until we finally succumbed to sleep – our efforts to stay up all night foiled by our young exhaustion. 

Christmas Eve sleepovers became an annual tradition, but we didn’t need the holiday for us to continue telling stories. In the backseat of the family van, we would pretend to be our favorite celebrities – my earliest form of fanfiction. We would write in little notebooks to keep our storytelling private from the reaching ears of my parents in the front seat. 

But one day, she got older, and I was left to play out my own stories. As a kid, most of my ideas were fabrications of stories I already knew. My first poem was a rewrite of Taylor Swift’s “Today Was a Fairytale.” I renamed it “Yesterday Was a Fairytale.” Very creative, young Lyndsey was. 

When I began writing my ideas down, I kept them hidden away in notebooks. While I viewed reading as a community activity, I found comfort in the solitude of writing. I never kept a diary, so my story ideas were the closest things you could find to reading my innermost thoughts. By reading my prompts, anyone could guess what was going on in my life. My crushes, my dreams that I wouldn’t dare vocalize, what kinds of books I had been reading recently. All of that was far too embarrassing to share, but it was so cathartic to get down on paper. 

By writing, I could take a step back from my life. I could write about my dreams and insecurities, but I could hide them behind a fictional character. 

By writing, we show the innermost parts of ourselves. We show the thoughts we could never share in conversation in fear of seeming too weird or self-obsessed. The feelings we capture using mere letters and punctuation marks are far too uncomfortable to share aloud. 

Eventually I learned that people could even find discomfort in the written word. I once compared politics to monsters in my house for an epic poem, and my parents received a concerned call from my school. In eighth grade, I was prompted to write a letter to any celebrity as practice for letter-writing. My librarian asked if I was okay when she read the letter I wrote to the purple Wiggle, mourning my waning childhood. My senior year of high school, my English teacher requested for me to make my personal essay less detailed. 

My early experiences taught me that writing felt less fun when I had an audience. 

Now, I’m in college and I’ve begun to take ownership of my experiences, my thoughts, and my feelings. My words are mine to share. 

Sometime in the past decade, I retired my fairytales in favor of self-reflections. Maybe one day they’ll find their way back to me again.

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Lyndsey Summers (she/her) is from the small town of McKenzie, Tennessee, and her grandest experiences live within the pages of her favorite books. She is a senior at the University of Tennessee majoring in journalism and minoring in English and advertising/public relations. She has worked as a general news reporter for her local newspaper, The McKenzie Banner, and is a social media intern for her university’s Student Life department. In her free time, you’ll likely find Lyndsey reading, adding to her Pinterest boards, or curating new Spotify playlists.