1. Inside Looking Out

Where to begin? It seems impossible to explain who I am in one short introduction, because I have nineteen years of ME, and if I can really sum that up in one blog entry, what does that say about who I am?

I could tell you I spend my weekends grinning as a party hostess or posing as Bat Girl, depending on my mother's mood, before changing out of my cartoon-character blue uniform and in to the person my group of tight-knit-always-feuding group of friends know. That girl is the type who carries at least two types of hand sanitizer at all times and is a little too honest with the people that matter. That girl is a fiction writer, whose essays are always three pages longer than they were allowed to be. That girl loves to go out to eat by herself, would rather see a movie alone than otherwise, and has a paralyzing fear of relationships that not even she herself understands, much less any one else.

I could tell you my favorite color (purple), or my favorite TV show (Charmed, followed by Supernatural). I could tell you about my parents, my younger brother and sister, the Venezuelan exchange student living in my house. We could discuss the plethora of books I adore, all for different reasons (The Time Traveler’s Wife, the Sword of Truth series, Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter. Twilight.)

I could tell you I’m a Sophomore at West Georgia this year, and all about wanting to be a fiction writer supporting herself with an Editing career. Maybe give you details on the fanciful image I have of myself in the future: living in a pristine glass house in the middle of the woods, being a normal, functioning person in society by day and a happy, partially-crazed writer by night.

And though all of that is entirely true, will anyone really remember that? Probably not. What you’ll come to know about me throughout the semester is who I am on paper (more real than anything else, and don’t you just love the juxtaposition of what I mean and what the saying “on paper” means? I do.); what aspects of my past, present and future life shape the writing I manage to produce.

You’ll see the affect my two wonderful, loving parents had on me…the two people who dragged me kicking and screaming from my comfortable life on Long Island, NY five years ago, insisting I would easily fall in love with our new home down South, where it the Summer season was so much longer (I hate the Summer season), the winters much less cold (I love the cold), and where there were still flowers in February (I mean, really, who cares?). In that same instant you’ll see a girl who doesn’t know how to coincide an adoration for her new, Southern friends with an intense longing for her best friend of fifteen years. In a way, you’ll all know me better than any of those people. You’ll see that, though I preach self-confidence to everyone with a pitiful expression on their face or a few self-loathing words, I wish I didn’t need everything straight, germ-free and in multiples of three.

I believe that you write for yourself first, and edit for other people later; that more than anything else a writer should use their work to learn what they think about a particular subject and then make it relatable for other people. I think writers need to be selfish, and then self-deprecatingly selfless. We need to be uncomfortable with writing, and we need to have a love-hate relationship with that discomfort, because as soon as we’re comfortable with it, we’re no longer writers. We need to have strong characteristics in order to know who we are, or we’ll lose ourselves to our characters whims. I believe that no one cares what we believe, and we need to know that, too.

Essentially, I believe writers live in a world of paradoxes, and I hate to love to hate that. I don’t really need to introduce myself fully, because anything I tell you now will be surface level compared to who I’ll become to you throughout the semester. I’m terrified of that, but I welcome the challenge.