Ambition Bird

It was Ivy Day a few days ago, and I am stressing out.

Why, you ask? It’s not like I’m a senior. Literally none of that should be on my list of top priorities right now.

But I can’t stop watching these videos of people talking about all the extracurriculars they did in high school, all the community service, and their amazing grades. Getting 5s on AP tests. 4.86 unweighted GPA.

And that sucks, because I see some of them getting into Harvard and Yale, and then I see others who’re just as impressive getting waitlisted or rejected.

I know that I should be striving towards a safe state school; it won’t cost much, it won’t be nearly as hard to get into as an ivy league. But I never did stop aiming for the stars, did I?

God, I remember when I was still writing my fucking time travel book. What a year. Each character I’d written had their own niche- Aubrey was a science gal, Ellie a literature person, Roxanne an art student. To determine what college each of them would go to, I’d literally google:

“Best colleges with literature programs!”

“Top science universities!”

And then I’d glance past all the colleges I’d never heard of, my eyes sticking on all the ivies. Because I wanted the best for my characters. They were always these likable, better versions of me. I wanted them to go to the very best of the best.

So, naturally, that wish has transferred to me. I’m my own character, now. I’m stuck on Columbia.

For Ellie, Columbia was a perfect match. It was in New York, and Ellie had aaalways wanted to live in New York. She’d always craved the bustle of people rushing to where they needed to go, to be able to walk in the bright sidewalks, going on subways. It was weird that she wanted that, but she had been stuck in her small town for so long that she just really wanted something different.

Surprise. Ellie was based off of me. It didn’t help that Columbia had an amazing creative writing program, and a prestigious journalism school. And also, to top it off, they offer a dual degree program for journalism and computer science. It’s like Columbia was MADE for me.

I hate that I have a dream school. It’s just something else for me to get disappointed with.

I’ve been binge watching videos of people who’d gotten accepted to Columbia, and GOD, how am I supposed to compete with them? How? I haven’t done anything life changing, nothing earth shattering. I’m sure that I could, if I wanted — join a couple more clubs, push myself to the limit. But one thing that’s always said in these college videos is: Be unique. Do what YOU want to do. And that kind of goes against the idea of doing a million things just to pad up my application, doesn’t it?

Obviously, my eyes drift towards journalism and computer science, both things that I am actively doing stuff for. I just need to be better, I guess. Better score at the Iowa State Cyberdefense Competition. Higher ranking on Girls Go Cyberstart.

And. I need to get off my fucking ass and WRITE MY SEXISM ARTICLE. But FOR SOME REASON, I can’t.

I’ve written THREE DRAFTS SO FAR. THREE. When I was first starting, I told myself that all I’d need to do was finish ONE draft, and then I could do damage control. But my first draft was terrible; there was absolutely no way to recover. Second draft wasn’t much better. Halfway through my third draft, I deleted everything and tried to start over.

And here I am. That’s where I am. The starting over part. And I have. No. Fucking. Idea. What to do.

I have so much information, and I have so many hopes and aspirations for this article. I want to get it published. I want it to change something. I want people to read it and be shocked and send it to their friends.

But, you know. All of that depends on it actually being GOOD.

And the most frustrating thing? My mind keeps getting distracted. I’m already bored. I want to get to the next thing. I’m already thinking up an article to write about Vietnamese immigrants through the generations, or to try my hand at stunt journalism to see how the conditions are in juvenile detention. I’m mad about it because I can’t do ANY OF THESE THINGS since these two drafts and experiment and interview notes keep staring at me in the face. I feel so guilty! I want a bucket of talent to fall on my face so that I can just FINISH IT, ALREADY.

God. Complaining about it to my blog of zero readers isn’t going to help much, is it?

The weak breeze whispers nothing

The water screams sublime

His feet shift, teeter-totter

Deep breath, stand back, it’s time

Toes untouch the overpass

Soon he’s water bound

Eyes locked shut but peek to see

The view from halfway down

A little wind, a summer sun

A river rich and regal

A flood of fond endorphins

Brings a calm that knows no equal

You’re flying now

You see things much more clear than from the ground

It’s all okay, it would be

Were you not now halfway down

Thrash to break from gravity

What now could slow the drop

All I’d give for toes to touch

The safety back at top

But this is it, the deed is done

Silence drowns the sound

Before I leaped I should’ve seen

The view from halfway down

I really should’ve thought about

The view from halfway down

I wish I could’ve known about

The view from halfway down

I feel like I don’t know how to be a person.

…I wonder if all I ever do is live a fantasy.

I build up ideas of people and then I get disappointed when those ideas are shattered. I build up ideas of relationships; I build up ideas of myself. None of it is ever real. My life isn’t real.

All my life, I’ve blanketed myself with stories and I’m not sure how much longer I thought that would fulfill me. There are times where I convince myself that it is okay, it’s okay, it’s okay that I only access love through fiction, it’s okay that everybody in this house feels sad.

But I don’t think it is okay. I feel so. sad. All the time. I have these stupid fucking ideas of what life is supposed to be like, of course I’m going to be disappointed.

Yesterday, I asked my mom if she ever felt sad. She told me that instead I should ask her if she ever feels happy.

I don’t think she understands how much it’s impacted me that she told me about when she tried to commit suicide. I don’t think my dad understands how much it’s impacted me that he told me Grandma used to tell Grandpa to beat him.

I think that it is impossible to live life happily. I want to stop feeling sad. I want to stop thinking that there is ever a life where I can stop feeling sad. I am so disappointed, all the time.

Why didn’t she tell me? Life is so messy. I’m only fucking 15, look at me sobbing up a storm. I’m just a really dramatic bitch, aren’t I?

Sometimes, all I want to do is get into a car and drive. Just drive. Where would I go? Who knows. I’d drive, and drive, and drive, and maybe I’d drive far enough that I’d forget about everything. Maybe I’d drive far enough that I’d be able to see the stars. Maybe I’d drive into the sun, like Icarus.

I am thinking about the time when Bojack Horseman wrote a letter to Secretariat asking him how one stops being sad. I would like to know the answer, too.

I’m replaying his words over and over. I don’t know why but I feel as if I’m about to cry; I’m listening to sad music and I’m thinking what is the point? I’ve lost it, whatever the point is, if I’ve even ever had it in the first place. I wish I could’ve asked more about what exactly had brought him almost over to the edge–I can think of one or two moments, but I wish that I had more. I always do this. I search for examples. A list by list, detail by detail account of everything I’ve done. I want all the information but I’m not sure he even knows.

That’s not necessarily what I’m sad about, though. I’m sad about a lot of things. I’m sad about how I say ‘I’ way too much, and I’m sad about the fact that my life isn’t a movie, and I’m sad about how I feel like there’s no fucking purpose for me. I wish that there was a purpose. I want a purpose.

I’m tired of dreading everything. Of looking back all the time. For once, for once, for once, I want to look forward.

It is Valentine’s Day, today. I’m spending it alone. Obviously. I think that people like me are destined to be alone. I’m one of those people that you like, and then you get to know, and then… yeah. And then you don’t like. Not anymore.

So long I’ve told myself that I don’t need love in my life, that I can do plenty of other things to be happy, but that’s not true. All anybody ever fucking wants is someone to love them. I’m not special. I’m not a girl who thinks her life can function without love. I’m a girl who knows that it can’t, and who knows that love isn’t a possibility, and who’s trying to fix a broken heart before it’s broken.

All I want is to be less lonely. I want someone to feel exactly the way I feel, which is absolutely ridiculous because nobody. feels the way I feel. I don’t even know what ‘the way I feel’ is. I want someone’s soul to match mine.

I can’t keep letting myself live in this facade of self dependence. I want someone to love me. There. I said it. I want someone to love me, and I know for a fact that that’s impossible.

Sorry for whining so much. I’m that one character in that one show whose brains you want to blow out, I know. I just don’t know where to put everything, so I’m putting it here.

Here. There. You take it. Maybe you’ll handle it better than me.

I like Bo Burnham an awful lot. I discovered him in the summer before freshmen year, and I haven’t been able to let go of him since. He’s the perfect mixture between funny ha ha! and deep haha? and sarcastic ha. And so I went on a spiral, of course, scouring the internet for every last inch of him. Watched as he awkwardly endured Katy Perry flirting with him, sang along with him as he played for Pitbull’s show, listened to him talk about watching YouTube videos of eighth graders. And I listened to podcasts.

Lots. Of Them.

One of my favorite songs by him is the ending of his Netflix special Make Happy: a Kanye West-inspired song called Can’t Handle This. If I were a more dramatic person, I would write that I got shivers just from thinking of that song.

Okay. I am that dramatic. I got shivers just thinking about that song.

I mean, it’s a goddamn masterpiece; I used to watch tons of video essays analyzing that song and loving every second of it like a fucking nerd. I really liked the idea of the burrito joke being a metaphor for all the pressures and anxiety Bo felt piling up due to his comedy career. I thought it was witty and funny and incredibly endearing.

So imagine my surprise when I listen to a podcast guest-starring Bo and hearing him say that the burrito joke was just. a. burrito joke.

Segways are weird! You know what else is weird? Art. What makes good art, what makes bad art. I used to think that art was good if it had meaning behind it, but now I’m not so sure, because you can literally ascribe meaning to anything, no matter how meaningless it is. Case in point: burrito joke.

I have always struggled with understanding the line between artist intention and consumer interpretation. I am sitting here writing this and still don’t know if the two should be the same. Is it okay if I interpret a piece of work differently than what the artist wanted? All English teachers would respond, “Yes! Of course it’s okay! Literary theory! Death of the author! Blah blah blah!”

But… is it really? I just feel so dumb for making something out of nothing.

Let’s take a detour from Burnham and talk about Shakespeare for a second.

Advanced English, freshmen year, we were covering the famous Shakespearean play; So You Think You Can Dance?

Whoops. Sorry. Not that one.

(I make really bad jokes.)

Okay, okay, it was Romeo and Juliet. Romeo, oh Romeo, where art thou, Romeo! Juliet, you idiot, he’s only into you because you have big tits.

To be fair, I was also into you because you had big tits, but it’s different because I’m a girl. Girls are innocent and perfect and can do no wrong and can never ever ever be sexist.

(btw juliet was a fucking whore just saying…)

Jesus, how did I get so off track. So for the class, we had to analyze the themes of Romeo and Juliet. For that, our English teacher really emphasized just how stupid the characters in the play were being, how reckless Romeo and Juliet were, all in the name of love. It was pretty easy to tell what she wanted us to write down for the “theme” section.

Everyone else read between the lines. I didn’t because I’m an idiot and I let the artists’ intention cloud my interpretation. My line of thought was: Okay, no way in hell did Shakespeare purposely write these characters to be dumb as fuck. He probably thought he was writing an epic saga about two (very much intelligent, very much reasonable) people falling in love. And so I strayed away from the Love makes you do reckless things theme and more towards the Love and violence are inherently intertwined route.

I felt stupid when everyone else did the former and I did the latter. I felt like I had the “wrong” answer, even though in literature you can never really be wrong. I was just so hellbent on considering Shakespeare’s original intent when creating the play, even though maybe his original intent wasn’t even anything worth analyzing. He literally could’ve just been bored and conjured up a plot for funsies.

This is just another example of the burrito joke, just like how people thought King Kong was an allegory for slavery, just like how people read Maggie Stiefvater’s werewolf trilogy and unearthed a metaphor for grief and Alzheimer’s.

Here is what Maggie had to say about it all: I remember when I wrote the Shiver trilogy, I thought I was writing it just for me—this quiet little werewolf novel. And then it sold in all of these countries, and I would get all of these emails from all around the world telling me that people had cried at this one chapter. I didn’t understand how this was possible until they started explaining to me what they thought the book was about. They would talk about how they thought that the werewolves were a metaphor for loss—a metaphor that reminded them of grief, or reminded them of losing a parent to Alzheimer’s. Once you take a true thing and you translate it into myth, then people translate it back into another true thing and it becomes universal again. I think as long as I’m being as true as I can when I translate that magic, people are going to keep on translating it back into a real thing. So, it feels like magic and reality at the same time.

I guess that that makes sense. I would love to think about it like that. It eliminates all possibility of Julie, you’re an idiot and it gives art meaning, which I love.

But even though I like the idea of it, I’m not quite sure if it’s true. It still is impossibly easy to make something out of nothing. To make a truth out of an untrue thing.

I don’t know. Art is like, the most important thing to me and so these types of conversations are always floating around in my mind. I wish I could have an answer. Yes or no. No maybes allowed.

But life isn’t programmed to work that way, is it?

I just changed like, my entire blog theme. Added pictures and shit. Whatever. There’s a whole big block of NOTHING at the end– I had to delete SO many pictures of guys in suits and pretty sunkissed girls. And for what? A blog?

Let’s see if I like it. I feel like I don’t, because now my blog posts aren’t as easily visible. Which is so absolutely attention-whorey of me.

And… now I have to go shower my greasy ass hair. Great.

I am so insecure that when two teachers compliment my sample and another says “I think it’s okay!” I feel like I want to shrivel up and die. And she was probably just saying that because I was asking if it was okay with the guidelines, and so the response makes sense, but I don’t know. I guess I’m unsatisfied. I’m unsatisfied and I’m terrified that this will not work out and that I’m actually a terrible writer.

I told myself that if I didn’t get accepted, I’d use it as a learning experience to improve myself and whatever, but am I mentally secure enough for that? What if I don’t get accepted and my entire writing self esteem just goes to shit? What if I never write again because of this one time when I didn’t get accepted? What if my entire view on writing shifts because I’m not good enough?

Sorry, I’m whining so fucking much. I just know myself, and I know that I’m so fragile that this could quite literally break me. It was a fun challenge, at first, but now the reality is hitting and all the what ifs are raining down.

I need to get my shit together and grow the fuck up. Maggie Stiefvater got rejected how many times before she got her first book published. I don’t know why I’m making such a big deal out of nothing.

My mind keeps coming back to something I wrote in my journal, middle-school era: “‘Writing books makes absolutely no money,’ Dad had said. I’ll show him.”

Now I feel like I have so much creative freedom! The words are bursting out of me! I can dump anything and everything in this blog that I’ve made! Time to go crazy go stupid! *screams in exclamation points*

I am a bit overwhelmed, if you can’t tell. My friend told me that I inspire her because of all the writerly things I’m doing, like trying to get journalism job (Brian, why haven’t you emailed me back?) and applying to a creative writing summer program (my sample is SHIT, so we’ll see how that goes). So, I decided, yeah, let’s try to look stuff for her to do. She’s amazingly talented and hardworking, I bet if I find her a competition to enter she’d have the time of her life.

Somehow, while I was in the whirlpool of BEST ART COMPETITIONS and HIGH SCHOOL ART OPPORTUNITIES and GOD THIS IS EXHAUSTING WHY ARE THERE SO MANY I found one that featured art AND writing. Which led me to a HIGH SCHOOL WRITING COMPETITIONS spiral. It makes sense. Everything I do always ends up coming back to writing.

Hah. I used that in my statement of purpose for the summer program application. I am such a good writer that I reuse phrases every five minutes.

After what seemed like ages of scrolling of through writing contests, I finally stopped to make this blog and now that I’ve let all the information marinate in my brain it’s safe to say that: I. Am. Overwhelmed.

There’s SO FUCKING MANY. And they all have cash prizes of $100 and they all have scholarship opportunities and I am worried because I can’t possibly do all of them. I am worried that I am not good enough to even do one of them. But I can’t mope around in my self pity for so long, that’s annoying. Nobody likes an insecure person. I need to listen to Lizzo more– if everyone were like Lizzo, the world would be such a better place.

I am probably rambling now, but I just love the feeling of translating thought to word to blog, when am I going to stop, help. This is just like when I got my first journal, or when I first made that private instagram account. I love the feeling of WRITING WORDS. I loovee doing it without worrying if the words are sophisticated or prettily purple enough. I can just be, in these environments. I can just exist.

Okay. I’m going to be writing on here a lottt, I can tell you that. Hope you stick around, if anyone’s even reading.

…what I’m doing. I read on another blog that aspiring journalists in high school should make blogs, and so now I’m doing it. I did it. It’s here, in all it’s cheap and unprofessional glory.

I’m not doing this just because the blog told me to, or because I want to have a career in journalism, or because I crave validation and attention blah blah blah. I guess I’m doing this because sometimes I get tired of puking all my words out on this private instagram I have. Whenever I make a post on that instagram, some selfish, stupid part of me wishes for someone to read it. Which is, you know, impossible, considering the instagram is private and has one follower. (The follower is me. I am the one follower.)

This is therapeutic for me. Another form of journaling, but minus the hand cramps. I honestly doubt that anybody will read this blog, and I like it that way. Knowing that nobody will read it but the chance of it happening still there.

Anyways. My name is Julie. I am a mess and I’m not saying that to be quirky, I’m saying that because I am literally a mess and I am warning you that everything I post on here is going to be me complaining about how much of a goddamn mess I am. All the time.

Sorry not sorry. This blog is for me. If anyone’s reading this… hi, and also, I have no clue how you’re going to be able to stand me.