Just a little scared…

Oh God, the mind-numbing fear of starting uni is beginning to set it. It really shouldn’t be, as this is my THIRD year but now that I’ve officially emancipated myself from my journalism dreams and jumped on the writer train, I’m starting to freak out. The best solution at this point in time is to hide myself away from my flatmates and confine my freak out to my own room. Otherwise, I am a little nervous that they will think I’m strange. And I mean, so far the past four weeks have been good and they haven’t picked up on it. I would hate to shatter the household now.

I’m not really sure what’s freaking me out to be honest. I think it has something to do with the fact that now I have no machine to rage against and its just me and the good old folks in the Creative Writing and Advertising schools. For the past two years I have always thought, oh well, at least I don’t really care about wanting to be a journo so it doesn’t really matter if I do well or terrible. Okay, that was a flat out lie to myself. I only really thought that once during my Journalism studies. And that was when I was standing in front of a camera on Ann St while the Cameraman lectured on what the fuck I was doing – because I had no idea myself. And it was at that moment when I realised that I probably looked like I weighed a hundred and 190Kgs in front of camera and was no where near as attractive as the pretty little blondes that were flitting around back in the newsroom, that my career as a writer did not lie within the Journalism category.

I have been saying for ages, in-fact probably comforting myself with the thought, that I would write a book. A novel even. And it wouldn’t been literary noteworthy but it would be my heart and soul on paper and maybe if I got my editing skills into top gear that I could actually get it published. But not that  I am looking down the barrel of a creative writing degree I am freaking out. I have to do it now. And those two great plots that I dreamed up in my head seem less significant, less emotional and really rather trivial and crap. And now I realise that wholly fuck, I am actually going to do this. No more talking about it, cry about Journalism and how I’m cut out for much more creative things. I now have to actually be a writer. And that seriously scares the shit out of me.

Sometimes I wish I had just sucked it up and gone, “You know what, being creative is such a waste of a lifetime. Do something useful like engineering, curing medicine or warming orphans.”  But then I remember how it feels to sit down and churn out a 9,000 word chapter in a couple of days and look back and go, omg, this actually means something. And it makes me wonder, if I took away the writing and my imagination, I don’t think I would be me. And even though I am extremely neurotic and have a terrible temper, there is one thing in my life that I am proud I can do. And that is put words on paper. And I love it.

(It is also the ability to overuse the word And in a blog. A skill my high school english teacher would kill me for if she ever read.)I’m still sacred and significantly more neurotic, but now that its down on paper, it seems like an entirely natural flaw.

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