The more I write, the better a writer I become.
I’m better than I was in August, in my sophomore year, in 7th grade.
And yet, some disinclinations—warped efforts that aren’t quite writer’s block—are still with me, over my shoulder in this silent classroom, pestering me.
I sit down and write something about a pre-determined topic in my life. And it is still inauthentic and frankly worse than anything typed absentmindedly and abstractly.
This is why
How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?
These are the questions that I’m not sure how to answer.
I haven’t quite figured out how to capture myself as a response to a prompt.
And, like last year, compartmentalizing and generalizing my junior year enough to fit it in a single coherent theme, into one goodbye-until-next-year column, has been 2,276 words that don’t particularly fit together.
The school year ends next week, and I nod along with remarks of, “I can’t believe it’s already May!” and “This year went by so quickly!”
But, really, it feels that way every year.
I’m older, obviously, with a more developed sense of time, and a single school year makes up less than five percent of my whole life up to this point.
But five percent is a fair amount, not without its distinctions. It has been characterized by:
Trying to excise so and like from the way I speak.
Moving from carefully curated and matching outfits of subdued tones to mixes of patterns and colors that only really work together because I believe that they do.
Speculative debates over the benefits and drawbacks of buying a flip phone.
A drastic expansion of the movies I’ve seen, accompanied by a learning curve in how to analyze them.
The friends that I’ve thought of as separate entities becoming a merged, jumbled, and interconnected group.
A fixation on podcasts.
And 10,000 other details.
The year was filled with an overload of information, and yet I still feel overwhelmed when I think about how much I still want to learn, listen to, read, and watch.
It has essentially concluded, and senior year has already been ushered in with candy bars and cookouts.
The final year is this year, not an abstract concept of the future. And it’s like my dedication to most everything that I’ve cared about for the past four years is being sewn together. It feels like I’m starting to see the benefits of front-loading my time and effort.
Next fall will likely be the balance of what is coming together with the fallout of what I have outgrown. It will be the last start to first editing, regular editing, and 40 more articles.
This is me saying goodbye to my dark-gray Converse and forcing myself to participate in things I no longer enjoy, and this is me saying hello to a continuation and a coming farewell.
