Sophia Mix

All the stories I write start to blur together for both me and the people that read them.

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It’s endless—the constant words I see being typed on the fake white page displayed on my computer screen. I live here in this small home I haven’t stepped foot out of since my freshman year.

Since I joined The Central Trend, my entire life has revolved around words.

Foolishly, I think they mean something. I imagine they will impact someone; maybe a child will look over their mom’s shoulder at her phone screen and read a few sentences I’ve spent hours agonizing over. Maybe it would change the way they think about the subject I wrote on. But the child wouldn’t care, and it’d disappear from their memory almost as quickly as all my stories do from mine. 

Of course, there are times when a story gets to enjoy an air of fake permanence—it wins a place in the top five trending stories on the site, or I win “Favorite Review of the Month”—yet even if I write a masterpiece, it loses its novelty in no more than a few weeks. 

This isn’t an “I’m losing my love for writing” column. I’m having trouble finding the purpose of my writing. I enjoy my art now just as much as I did when I wrote low-quality fantasy in 1st grade, but there’s a sadness involved now. 

Because my writing isn’t valuable, and they’re just silly stories. They don’t help solve the seemingly endless crises of this world that continue to worsen each week. Who cares what I think about a random album that the vast majority of people don’t care about? The issue is our society insists everything we put into the world must have a purpose—typically in the form of monetary value. The musings of a sophomore in high school have no significance.

But I love my writing. I love reading other people’s writing. It has no cash value. No currency can my words be sold for; its only impact is the slight upturning of lips. Can’t that be enough? 

It’s a blessing in disguise, I think. I don’t want to contribute to the never-ending want for more and better and now. In its own way, I’ve realized, a writing piece without a price tag can be my own small way of rebelling against the ways of this world. Even if my entire presence in my high school’s small newspaper is completely forgotten by the time I finally graduate, I have faith that I can make a positive change while I’m here.