Arts + Sciences

It was the slow Sunday evening that drove me to clean out the junk that had been collecting dust on my desk for the past few years. And like any major cleaning activity, I found memories in the form of a notebook I had bought during high school and that ran out of paper sometime after my first year in college. Pages upon pages of all my thoughts for roughly three years. I picked it up and looked at the first page, thinking what a naïve, young girl I used to be. But there was something about the innocence of those words that made me keep turning the pages for an hour until I reached the culmination of ambiguity: the mind and soul of an artist trapped in a body that is forcefully intimidated into pursuing science.

In the years since I ran out of pages in that notebook, the ambiguity seemed to clear up. But the hour I spent with the hopeful dreamer I once was showed me that it's only been so fogged up I forgot how to see it. There are so many important decisions in a person's life and they all feel like major crossroads: what subjects to take in the summer? What university to go to, what major to declare? Whether to start dating a boy? When it's really time to break up? And here I am at yet another crossroad: what to do with my life?

The fear and uncertainty is crippling, to say the least. Ever since I was a kid I have always known I've wanted to be a writer. What kind of writer exactly was something that was always up for debate. Just a writer. A recorder of history and contemplation. Sometime after that notebook ran out of blank pages that dream started to fade. No, it didn't fade, it just moved farther and farther away from me. So it's still always been there. It just feels more like a distant dream now that a firm ambition. And here I am: a software tester who doesn't even blog anymore.