And so it begins...

I like writing. In fact, the first thing most people will tell you about me is that I am a writer. Some people will actually tell you that I'm a good writer, but usually it's just "Oh, her? She's a writer." Writing is what I want to do with my life. Except, of course, everyone tells me that I'm a good writer. Sometimes I think they're just humoring me. I mean, yeah, I believe that I'm a better writer than a lot of people. But does that make me good at writing? Or does that just make my dream of being published a hair more feasible? The thing I like about this image (which may not be from PostSecret, but it's from the PostSecret Facebook group) is that it kinda sums me up. I'm not good at math, I'm not good at singing, I'm not even good at driving. But I kinda pride myself on my writing. Yeah, my poetry may be emo crap, and I may totally suck at writing essays... but writing brings some kind of relief into my life.

Supposedly, blogging and journaling are good ways to strengthen writing. I tend to disagree though, because blogs are usually about ideas not necessarily skill at writing and journals are usually private. My belief is that you need reinforcement and critiquing to better yourself at wordcraft. I prefer to think of blogging as practicing the skills, or practicing a different kind of writing. I mean, yeah, you can make a blog for other people to critique you, but then you risk your stuff being pirated and whatnot.

I didn't truly believe that I was a writer until just recently. I mean, yeah, I may've called myself a writer, but that doesn't mean that I actually was one. I mean, being a writer is more than just writing. Being a writer is making others believe that you're a writer. About a month ago, my friend, we'll call her Bubbles, and I were in the back of a car on the way to rehearsal for the musical theatre production we had been in at the time. We were separated by a boy in our carpool, and the two of them were talking about writing. [It may be helpful for me to note here that Bubbles is obsessed with a certain band and writes FanFictions about the members of this band.] The boy in our carpool was talking about... a book, perhaps? Something he was writing. And the driver of the car, we'll call her Mini, had found a bit of a lull in her conversation with the girl next to her to ask what the back of the car was talking about. I was not actually part of the conversation, being the withdrawn being that I am. But when the boy said "Oh, we're talking about writing. Bubbles and I are both writers," it just kind of struck me in a weird way, because he said it in such a way that made me cringe. And then my friend says, "So is Catnip." Catnip, of course, being me. And that kinda made me feel good, because no one had ever actually called me a writer before. I'd been told that I would be a writer, but I'd never actually been called one. And it felt really nice.