The Apocalypse is All My Fault

For someone who wants to be a writer when they grow up, I certainly don't do much writing*. I've always scoffed at people with blogs. For example, I took a gap semester, and when my family asked how they would hear about my adventures I promised each and every one of them, "don't worry, I won't be another girl with a blog". I promised that I would skype them and email them all the time. I did not do that.

Here I am, breaking another promise. Here I am being just another person with a blog.

How did I become such a hypocrite? How did this change come about?  Well the first question is easier to answer- I have always been one. The second question is a little harder.

I'm going to start at the end. This past Spring of 2015, I started college. After coming back from 3 months in Europe completely alone, I was surprised at how well I was able to make friends. I was also surprised at how much I immediately liked all of those friends. They are all creative in ways I'm not used to. I had never had so many friends in bands, writing songs, drawing, writing blogs; publicly sharing their art with whoever was interested. Art became more than just an elective to take, more than a high school requirement. I was surrounded by near strangers who wanted to hear and see any creative thought I had to offer.

This amazed me. I was used to expressing myself to my close friends, but never to a group of people I had met less than a month ago.

When I was younger, my favorite thing to do switched between eating and reading. However, I didn't read many diverse books- I mostly just stuck to rereading Harry Potter with a few Sarah Dessen novels thrown in as I got older. This meant I got bored of reading very easily. And with the food network being on at the very early hours of the morning I liked to live through at a young age, combined with my never ending appetite meant that I spent a large portion of my youth wanting to be a Chef.

A lot of those things have changed. I now sleep until noon every morning, I rarely watch TV, but when I do it's to catch up on Game of Thrones or True Detective. There is no time to watch other people make brunches I can't eat- Rachel Ray has been put on the back burner, if you'll allow the pun.

I found myself enjoying books because they were portable, and while I was toted around errands with my parents, I read and read until my mom complained about how much we were spending on books (I liked them new when I was little- now I'll take anything I can get).

These past few years as I realize that reading and writing are what I want to Do, I have been continuously frustrated with myself because I have so little to show for it. I like writing a lot, but I am too embarrassed to put anything Out There. (I think it's because that term "Out There" is so vague and so scary. It seems like I'm throwing my poems into space to be reviewed by aliens and if the aliens don't like it they'll probably attack earth with lasers, and then the demise of the planet will be all my fault, and I'll feel terrible).

But I also figured this would be a good way to practice writing and maybe have people read it and tell me what they think and stuff. Because I hear that's a pretty important part of the writing process. But as I have told you earlier, I am very bad at keeping promises. So here is a list of things I won't promise about this blog:

- That I will keep it up
- That it will be interesting
- That I will tell anybody about it

Today it took me two hours just to get out of bed, so who knows how long it will take to write another post on this thing. Continuity is not one of my strengths.

Until next time!
- Jenna

*Public writing. I write a lot in private, but the issue with this is you start to believe your writing is just a figment of your imagination because you're the only one who knows about it.