I am a self-absorbed, mediocre workaholic.

I think that’s why I have always wanted to become a writer, it seems like a hobby to most but it’s actually the most excruciating, time-consuming work that you can do. I love it. And I love what I write, I’ll make no bones about it. It is perhaps my first experience of unconditional love. I know what I write is not perfect, it doesn’t win awards or change lives. It is not over achieving or particularly profound but I love it still.

I am fascinated with pain. How it makes us better people. It is always the people who have never been hurt that do the hurting. How the more pain I endure, the more grateful i am for this ridiculous life. And oh boy, is wanting to be a writer painful. Especially if you are merely average. The actual writing part is (and this is the only word I can think of to describe the experience) sensual. You pour yourself into a screen, a page, the world disappears around you apart from your Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits playlist and you honestly enter into a different state of mind. I can only compare it to psychedelics and even then, writing is much more confusing, intense and transformative. But that is why we must write and it is the easy part. The hard part is thinking of something interesting to say, pestering strangers to read your work, trying to get “noticed”. It is a sick irony that writers – society’s most insecure and introverted- must beg for attention and criticism.

Some people run 10k at 6 a.m., some partake in winter swims or go to retreats in India and not speak for four months. In our disgusting, privileged Western world, where our insecure parents gave us everything we ever wanted, we long to feel uncomfortable. I want to write because it makes me feel insignificant and untalented. It pushes me and consumes me and gives me a reason to(To what? I have not yet figured out).

I study harder, drink more coffee, write more poems, dye my hair more colours, smoke more cigarettes and read more books than most. And yet I am nothing more than depressingly average.

I am addicted to becoming a proper “writer”, a desire that will haunt me until I die, I am sure. But that is the way it should be. It is how I like it. Insecure, determined and ambitious. To set unattainable goals is to live truly. It is why we go to war. We all just want to fight for an impossible life.

And so I will write these barely half thought out articles and mediocre poems. I will go to a mid tier university and graduate with a 1:2 in English and I will fail miserably at being a journalist, possibly have two terribly normal children and probably get divorced, before settling in a housing estate that looks exactly like the one I live in right now and become apathetic about politics. And I am okay with that, it’s the natural order. Because I know that I will give my blood, sweat and tears to everything I love. And if it fails, I can be proud of it anyways. I will try to be a writer, a student, a girlfriend, a mother, a communist. And I will try my damn best to be the most exceptional one out there. And I will fail.

And I will try once more.