writing

I have trained myself to be a natural pessimist. I tend to assume the worst because I'd rather set the bar low and be pleasantly surprised than set it high and be disappointed every time. I hate the crushing feeling in my chest when things don't go according to plan. So anyway, I'm on a UIL writing team and we had an invitational competition today. (the premise of ready writing UIL is that you get two quotes and you pick one to write an essay about and you have 2 hours to do it and no preparation.) I almost bailed last minute because I didn't feel like getting up early this morning to drive out to a school 25 minutes away. But I ended up going and we were sitting around in the cafeteria of this school waiting for it to start so we could go into the room, and I was explaining my pessimism philosophy of assuming I was going to do poorly and not place rather than assuming I was going to do well and end up with failure. Writing is a little to close to heart to let myself assume to much of my abilities, if that makes sense at all. I care about it too much to assume I'm good and have someone tell me I'm wrong. But this girl on the team (who I was friends with for years when we were younger before she moved schools, and then she just moved back to my school) said something about my writing being good and "you've wanted to be an author since we were in like second grade. You'll be fine."

And it hit me that I have wanted to be an author my whole life. Writing is all I've ever really considered doing; the only thing I've ever seen myself doing for years and being happy with. I used to think that people who were truly gifted in their respective fields had to have some cool story somehow proving that they belonged where they were, like getting something published when they were like 10 or inventing something in their field at 15 or something. Maybe it's not the same thing, but my back story is that it's all I am. Writing is all I am at the end of the day, and maybe I'm not the best at it, and maybe you're cringing reading this right now, but it's all I know and it's all I love, so I guess I'd better make it work.

This is extremely convoluted and probably doesn't even make sense, but I'm too tired to change it now. Au revoir, mes amis.