If I Weren't Underage, I'd Be Drinking While Writing This

For the first time in my life, I have the sudden really strong desire to talk to someone. About anything.
Strange, really - I'm not the kind of person who chats on the phone with her friends. I never used to chat at all unless by pure social necessity. And yet here I am, having a conversation with an assembly of lights on a computer screen that spell out, "Lonely and Trying to Grow Up."



Things are happening, and none of them are as dramatic or exciting or fulfilling as I thought they would be. I am failing at being superb. It makes me feel like a failure at everything.
In a sense I am. Sun Road is failing. I am at 21,000 words and have been there for five days, and March is basically done. Spring Break is not the productive source of all my great successes that I had bargained everything on for it to be. I can see it in my story habits - I jump from section to section, Sun Road to cartoon script to short story to poem to fanfiction to blurb, restless, burning with a desperate need to get something done, but confused as to what, lost as to where, forgotten as to how. God I need to calm down.

Two pages of my novel a day. That's all I ask of myself.
I beg this of myself. Have prayed it for two months now.
And I've managed one page a day at most.

Habit is a strong force. Back in November, I could do this - I sat myself down for two to three hours every day, just writing. But now I can't bring myself to focus for more than one hour at a time. I've spent too long fooling my minutes and hours and days away. Now, when it counts, when my life is a series of open doors that will no longer wait considerately for me to reach them before closing, when I haven't a moment to spare, I have gotten into the habit of failure.

I need to talk to someone about all this. I've never needed that before. I don't talk about myself. I talk about the weather, I talk about school, I talk about how beautiful life is and that we should all look forward to what tomorrow holds. I don't speak of my despairs.

The hopeful side of me says that this is a good sign. I don't use books to run away from myself anymore. I can't. There is far, far too much I need to say, and not enough time to listen to all the others say their parts. I have my own self to write down.

I could laugh at myself. The rest of the world assumes that all my stress originates in schoolwork, and college researching, when really these are only the messy brightly-colored sideshows to the greatest, blackest exhibition of my soul. All I can think about is how I need to write and how I can't write. My world is so small, yet so terrible and vast. It's the world within my mind.

Too many...