Do you ever go back and read an essay or something you wrote a year or so ago and think, when did an intellectual possess my body and write something of actual literary value?
I believe we are all a lot more capable than we give ourselves credit for, and are often guilty of looking at our past triumphs as bars we’re not quite sure we can raise, so why not just leave them where they are? Or maybe I should speak for myself…
What I mean to proclaim is that I often find myself reading old blogs and poems my high school self found true passion in writing between the hours of way-too-late and way-too-early and think, what ever happened to the woman I was so fervently working to become?
Of course, moving across the country and making my way through university has posed some practical barriers, mostly related to my lack of time management, but more than anything I fear my course has been shaken.
I’ve wanted to be a writer since the first time I read a book that changed who I was by the time I put it down. By age 9, I was sure that path was going to unveil itself to me in the form of authorship. I was going to spend my days enveloped in a passionate relationship with a typewriter, and when I wasn’t writing I would be reading. I would live in a tiny cottage near a small town; my humble existence immortalizing itself between pen strokes, dog-eared pages, and worn spines. I would be nothing to most, but to those who turned my pages and, by the time they put them down, felt as though they existed somewhere between them with me, I would be infinite.
But, alas, I did not grow up in the early 20th century. Typewriters are now aesthetic paperweights, and telling someone you want to be an author is like telling them you want to be a starving daydreamer.
So I adapted my course — I would be a journalist!
Then I adapted it further — I would be an online journalist, who did website design on the side.
And then further — I would be a social media strategist, who (hopefully) did some freelance writing on the side...
And then 2 years had passed and my fingers had not stroked a keyboard or filled a notebook with words that had the power to change anyone or anything except my GPA.
This is me saying I wish to start again.
