It's 10:39. My eyes are burning. I don't want to sleep. My heart itches. I do not know how else to describe this. This restless, irritable feeling I harbor here. I feel like pacing and screaming and banging away on the piano. But those would make too much noise for my brother, who is asleep, and my dad, who has not told me to go to bed. So I write. And I appologize for any typos or grammatical errors. My fingers are shaking too much to type properly.

It's too hard to be quiet. It does not pay to be silent. I don't care that that wise Greek once said that "I have often regretted speaking out, never that I remained silent." He must have lived in the antithesis of my world. To keep your opinions to yourself, is like condemming yourself to nonexistence. People don't notice you. You don't notice yourself. I can't keep saying nothing, doing nothing. It contributes nothing to the world and helps no one. Yet I cannot speak out. The mechanism that keeps me quiet is automatic. Anything that might motivate me to act, to help people, to do something active in the school or the community is shut out by fear. It is that simple. Fear. It's haunting me and I can't get away.