pay no attention to the maturity of this post

[aruan]

Much-smarter-than-me best friend encouraged thinking about what I want to do when I grow up, if what I'm doing right now or the track I'm planning will keep me from it, if I still want to write, if newswriting will suck the soul out of my distinctly not-made-for-it prose, if fandom can be an adequate outlet for it if that's the only medium I choose to pursue it in, and what is it exactly that worries me about all this and is it insurmountable.

And I realized hey, let's not be afraid of what we want.

Yeah, it would be nice if I had another semester of school left so I could start out at the somewhat lighter gig of Freelance Editor, but if Dwayne has this mountain of confidence in me to speak my mind and get it right and I never understand where people get this confidence in my abilities but he cited me examples and damn it but he's right and I can and I cannot cannot be afraid of this. I want it, and that's okay, that's good, I'm not overstepping any boundaries but those of my own comfort zone.

I got a little hysterical back there when the realization hit that they want me to be an editor and fuck, but that's so much more faith than I would've put in myself before tonight. It's amazing what you can allow yourself to want once your horizons have been forcefully broadened.

You know, it really will be a fucking miserable job. I will be working eight hours a day, five days a week, for not much more than I'm making now. People will hate me for what I include, people will hate me for what I choose to pass over for coverage. Writers will hate me for criticizing their stories and getting final say about a turn of phrase. They won't see that I work twice as long as they do or that I won't have anything resembling even the pseudo-life I lead now.

If I'm honest with myself, I realize newspapers will only ever be something that's a good distraction for me, something I like but not anything that'll let me do what I want to. Because deep down inside lives a dancing dramatist, and it was my own damn fault for giving up on the things that could've made her matter because of a few of the wrong people whose opinions mattered just enough anyway to discourage me.

But it's time to play in the real world, and I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do it well, and yeah, I'll probably come close to slitting my wrists the first week, and then I will spend the weekend crying while walkingshadow attempts to comfort and coax me back from the edge, whereupon she'll take me for coffee and tell me she loves me and that I'm a smart, capable person who just needs to believe it. And that's all I'll need to do this right, and maybe even get a little closer to grown-up in the process. Staci says to make Dwayne promise I won't have to do it alone (the desk is split between two people, Metro and University). Wonder if Justin's staying on.

It's a little bit like going to France all over again, actually. That scary, that uncertain, that obvious nothing will keep me from falling on my face if I don't do my damnedest not to. Is this what life is? A series of stepping offs of planes in a foreign country with one suitcase if you're lucky?

Fuck. I'd kill for a cigarette and possibly some heavy anti-anxiety medication. Which I might actually look into - professionally, of course - before I develop a class-A ulcer over Winter Break about all of it.

Comments

[gjstruthseeker.livejournal.com]

I really ought to listen to people who know me. They end up being so much righter than myself.

Thanks lots, hon. It's just not the next logical step in the office - that would be Desk Chief - then at least one more before that level of editorship. And yet, here we are. It's terribly cool and terribly scary at the same time.