Blank pages comfort me. It’s something I never thought I’d say. The pressure of college deadlines erased the freedom of blank pages for a few years, paragraphs often sheared or stretched, tweaked or tortured to fit the word count, the required structure — something.

Since graduating, I’ve found renewed writerly peace, strangely, in blank and inked pages alike, each providing a sense of comfort etched at opposite ends of the innovation spectrum. Earlier this week, I had the afternoon off work, so I spent it at Ephemera, my favorite stationery store in Des Moines’ East Village, and Central Library.

The stationery store is a source of confidence, each blank postcard quietly calling, “Hey there, Writer. You’ve got things to say. Say them!” An assortment of empty cards and notebooks form a wobbly stack atop my bookshelf, their empty pages a reminder that there is always, thankfully, something to say.

That premise can, of course, be dangerous, which is where the library comes in. It’s appropriate that the books are enclosed in a semi-transparent, gold façade, the reflective panels inviting me while lending the building an intimidating grandeur. The library is a polite reminder that it’s OK to have confidence as a writer, but it’s equally important to read, to inhabit others’ stories and selves, shaping my own in the forver-humbling process.

My apartment, fittingly, is almost exactly halfway between the stationery boutique and the library. Every day, I strive for writing that strikes a balance between inspiration from the memoirists and autobiographers whose books are permanently anchored below the cup of tea on my coffee table (don’t worry, there’s a coaster) and the blank pages perched a tad greedily on the shelf, each giving me an overzealous writerly pep talk.

Somewhere in the middle, as I teeter between caution and confidence, the page transforms from blank to black and white.

I ran to heal, I claimed. It was a neat, tidy motivation, one I could tuck in my mind like I tuck my key in my shoelace. Committing to the half marathon would help me get over a failed relationship while providing a new milestone, something flashy to cloak raging feelings of inadequacy, something shiny to brandish when asked, “What’s new?”

Running is the constant, physical manifestation of moving forward, I theorized; therefore, my mind and emotions would follow the same progressive path. When I crossed the finish line in October, I would be healed.

But in the tired delirium of being trapped in my brain for up to three hours over 13-some miles of pavement, I found myself anchored not to the glittery, “What’s new?”-worthy future but to the past. I ran forward, reciting entire conversations in my mind, the ones I deleted from my phone but couldn’t erase from memory, the impact of my shoes creating a disjointed beat; I slid into madness even as I made physical progress.

During the particularly tough mileage days, I found myself breathlessly mumbling strings of jumbled sentences, something like, “You can do it, three more miles, I hate you, why couldn’t you have kept me around, there might be a bug in my eye, don’t say things you don’t mean, don’t say you want to stay friends, why the hell did you register for the half.”

As the training runs have stretched on, I’ve learned to dedicate each mile to one thought, idea or regret, throwing my whole body and mind into its fitful rumination, contemplation and eventually, meaningful reflection.

Sometimes I even manage to sneak in an A-ha! moment or epiphany — something new to tuck in my shoelace.

My fear has grown up with me. At times it is 13-year-old Taylor at the eighth-grade scary-movie sleepover, then the emblem of rebellion, with “The Silence of the Lambs” playing. My bowl of M&M’s is scattered across the shag carpet in my friend Katie’s basement. I sketch invisible lines from candy to candy, weaving my own invisible safety net. It’s funny how fear guides me to chaotic sources of comfort and order.

At times my fear is overdramatic and older than its age. I fret about ‘missed’ milestones and milestones that are years in the future; whether or not I’ll ever get married, funding my dream trip to the Istanbul Open, saving enough for retirement. Meanwhile, I sit here eating graham crackers caked with neon-yellow frosting (OK, so I haven’t mastered the whole wise-beyond-my-years thing yet).

Lately I’ve confronted and engaged fear in a variety of ways, through the goal of doing one thing a month that scares me.

I’m volunteering for the presidential campaign I support. I’m mentoring high school sophomores and juniors with the Greater Des Moines Partnership’s Youth Leadership Initiative. I’m training for my first half-marathon.

All three terrify me in different ways, ways that weave together the complexities of fear, fear that lurks in half-empty tubs of Pillsbury frosting, spilled M&M’s and lingering disbelief.

In writing-major tradition, I debated between “disbelief” and “unbelief” in the above sentence for 10 minutes, followed by my four-mile evening run. Though they’re technically synonyms, I clung to one word in the definition of “disbelief.”

According to my dictionary app, “disbelief” is the “lack of faith in something,” whereas “unbelief” is “an absence of faith.” I like the word “lack.” It suggests not the complete absence of faith but a persistent deficiency, something I can replenish with reflection and writing.

Before I write anything about my life, I read a minimum of one chapter from a memoir or autobiography by a female writer. The other day, this newfound ritual led me to the perfect quote, one I still can’t get out of my head: “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves.” I am not hiking the Pacific Crest Trail like Cheryl Strayed in Wild; I am, however, a compilation of my own stories, and I’m consciously working to rewrite them.

I have a new invisible safety net, one found not in spilled M&M’s but in sentences, each period, exclamation point and question mark serving as the next destination in an ideological, identity-forming connect-the-dots.

Travel memories work like an old-fashioned slide projector. They hum, the crunching gears cruelly reminding me I’m no longer elsewhere. Eventually, I fade into the memory once again, and the humming fades with it; I’m elsewhere for that fleeting moment. Then, click, I’m jolted to the next memory, forever too soon.

In college I traveled regularly, reveling in the fear, glee, confusion, angst and self-awareness it inevitably offers. Without the flexibility of traveling in my post-grad life, I’ve found my gaze lingering on photos of Istanbul, Izmir, New York, New Orleans (and more), bummed I can’t remember every little detail like I promised my mesmerized college self I would.

Rather than ogle at my painting-like Izmir album any longer, I returned to the root of my fascination with world traveling, one I hope to realize.

My sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Stone, broke out his slide projector only on the most special days, days reserved for faraway places and more importantly, ditching the cliché rubbish of your typical world culture textbook.

With each wheezing journey of the projector, we visited Japan, China, Russia, Africa through his travels, each slide lingering long enough to provide a tiny twinge of longing, a silent “Wait!” when the “click” sounded, ushering me into a new elsewhere. I hadn’t had time to process every pixel of the previous photo, after all!

Memories operate like the beloved, resilient slide projector, I learned when I fell off my couch the other day. While trying to find the perfect angle for my new frame featuring the Izmir, Turkey, skyline, I had plenty of time to take in the photo, to relive the memory in its fullness. That’s what I thought, anyway.

After nearly 10 minutes of juggling the frame and my level with ever-poor balance, it bothered me that I couldn’t remember every detail of that experience — how we got to that lookout area, what kind of flowers bloomed there, even the name of it.

Then I realized it’s OK to not remember every detail because when I stop worrying about the natural fading of tangible memories, I find it’s easier to re-experience the beautiful feeling of wandering, wherever I am.

Intention: It manifests tangibly in my everyday world. The stack of library books perched on my coffee table in the order I’ll read them. My prioritized, color-coded to-do list. The growing nest of Command strips, nails, hooks and tools on the counter, each a promise to my blindingly blank walls that they’ll one day house the “grown-up girl” art I claimed I’d buy after college.

Even my well-intentioned world of cryptic, multilevel to-do lists is its own illusion. Intention, I realized recently, is about more than checking items off my list or adding a new interview-worthy skill to my resume every few months; it’s about deliberate efforts to break old habits and, for me, returning to a few really ugly moments.

I’ve only recently found the gumption to reflect on the semester of college I spent binge-drinking cheap, terrible booze (example: my roommates and I had practically every flavor of UV vodka emptied atop our kitchen cabinets as decoration … decoration). My lone intention that semester was to feel as little as possible. I felt bad for feeling bad about something that my logical side said shouldn’t have broken me like it did. I felt lost after a beloved professor’s sudden death.

(If you derive one nugget of wisdom from this post, let it be this: UV lemonade is the awful, 21-plus version of errant bug spray floating into your mouth before that summer trip to the lake.) Back to the constructive commentary.

I’m rethinking intention through a series of daily changes. Rather than wandering the Internet each morning in search of the answer to some existential question (i.e. “Which Taylor Swift ‘1989’ music video are you?”), I’ve started reading one chapter of a memoir or autobiography (I recommend Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies). There’s something about peering into someone else’s soul at 5:34 a.m. that invites me, gently, to examine my own.

I noticed the stark, beautiful contrast of these streetlights in a moment of stillness on one of my evening walks.

After I finish that chapter, I force myself to be still for five minutes. Before the commotion of my pre-6 a.m. playlist, before my morning ritual of emptying my entire jewelry box to find the necklace that best complements my (probably) black outfit, I’m slowly finding it more natural to confront my fears in a positive, focused manner.

In the spirit of intention, I’ve embraced the idea that you should like what you damn well like, and it doesn’t matter if anyone else thinks it’s hip. Recently at an outing with a friend, I was amid one of my usual, “I love tennis! I love Arabic! I love dinosaurs! I kick ass at Centipede!” flail fests, and I realized it’s cool to be passionate about a lot of things.

With it, the tangibility of intention has faded in my life. Yeah, I still enjoy the satisfaction of checking another task off my to-do list, but I find myself feeling most productive and purposeful, bizarrely, when it’s 5-something in the morning and two minutes remain of my “Taylor, sit still” time. It’s in those ticking 120 seconds that I feel a little bit more like the intentional, mindful grown-up girl I hope to be.

Errant droplets of tea create a path in my apartment, clinging to the lip of my favorite owl mug until they fall. When I can’t make sense of my life, I pour a mug of tea and pace.

Sometimes as I pace, I find myself trying to strip pivotal conversations of their emotional value; break them down into something formulaic, impersonal. An unexpected application of my English degree.

A few days ago I found myself dwelling on the end of a relationship, rereading old text messages as I admit I’m prone to do. Rather than succumb to the usual, toxic practice of pinpointing specific places I could have been funnier/wittier/smarter/etc., I began diagramming and labeling the verbs in my mind. Intransitive, monotransitive, ditransitive, copula, complex transitive. I plotted the form of each sentence, using colored text, italics and returns to reimagine my pain as a pattern, one I can plot, map and organize.

The terminology I once feared has become not an academic tool, a means of getting an A on the next essay, but a means for visualizing disappointment — proof that my pain exists in tangible, color-codable clarity.

I’m no longer worried about how I could have been funnier/wittier/smarter/etc. I was and am a complete being; my writing, whether it’s a text, tweet, press release or letter, reveals my pattern of thinking, feeling, being.

Tangibly mapping language is proof that my feelings and pain are real — that I’m real. Proof that order can exist amid erratic emotions and hurt that resurfaces when unexpected.

Each familiar sentence form and unconsciously recurring verb form are proof that the only thing I ever am — and will ever be — is authentically, innately me.

The girl who should probably buy a coaster for each piece in her mug collection, regularly spills her tea and diagrams sentences in her free time.

Running and dwelling: I’ve been meditating on the two lately; a strange pair they are. When I run — the physical embodiment of moving forward in pursuit of that faraway goal of the Des Moines Half Marathon in October — I find myself dwelling, immobilized by unmoored thoughts rooted in what was.

I remember the European boy who was mean to me on a 2014 study abroad trip. How I swooned over the two-and-then-some languages he spoke; how he admired my English vocabulary and the obscure words that wind their way into everyday chatter.

I think of the semester of college I spent binge drinking cheap, terrible booze, completely paralyzed by the incident and unable to cope in positive manner.

I relive the time a textbook taught my Arabic class to use the same word for “friend” and “boyfriend,” and I spent an entire week introducing every guy in class as my boyfriend. The dwelling isn’t entirely founded in negative experiences or memories.

This blog emerged on a run, sentences punctuated by moments of breathlessness, some fueled by the exertion, some by the painful memories themselves, I think.

There’s a certain preoccupation with “getting over” things, one that doesn’t give us permission to work through anything on our own timeline.

For me, there is often an extended period of intense, well, ranting. I’m talking swear-word laden, repetitive, teenage-Taylor-worthy rubbish. But every once in a while I find a valuable nugget of wisdom or useful sentence amid that rubbish, something that later leads to a blog post, an essay or simply a day-to-day epiphany.

When I run, I dwell; when I find myself dwelling on something, I run. Maybe it’s dangerous to simulate a sense of progress by physically moving forward while I return to some ‘traumatic’ experience that then felt like the collapse of my proverbial universe. But maybe running is the safe space in which I’m free to ruminate, replay and relive the painful. And when I regain my breath, I often find that I’ve gained perspective.

I’m over “getting over it.” I’m the one running through it.