Twenty-Something Year Old Journalist

It’s 6:29pm on a Tuesday, and I am yet again convinced that I will never amount to anything and will never feel fulfilled.

I remind myself l am only 23, and to chill the fuck out. How am I to chill the fuck out when I’m waiting for a man from Hinge to text me back and reading The New Yorker, disappointed I didn’t write any of these articles first?

I have just finished my Trader Joe’s microwaved Thai shrimp gyoza and am waiting for my dad to return home and say hi before I sneak away for a smoke. I’m not even really sure l even want to be high right now, but it just feels like the right thing to do.

I’m trying to write an insightful, call-to-action article connecting my viewing of Hamilton to Donald Trump’s descent into authoritarianism, but so many New York Times opinion writers have already said what I want to say, in much better writing than I ever could. 

I dream of writing a TV show one day. Girls and Broad City have already been created, though, and Adults just came out, so I guess instead I’ll just go fuck myself.

I shouldn’t write for others, though—I should write for myself. But how am I supposed to know if I’m good or not without the validation of others?

To think I started a personal blog just for myself, yet am paralyzed with fear for what people l have not talked to in years will think.

Thinking about it, I should probably delete Instagram. It does me no justice and my high school crush stopped viewing my stories a long while ago. 

I should bring this all up with my therapist. He’ll applaud me for my honesty and vulnerability, but I’ll be too fixated on his praise to actually listen to his advice.

I wonder if this piece is even any good. I only started writing it to free my mind of the spiral that in only seven years time I will be 30 and what will I have to show for it? 

I start writing and it no longer is for me. I think of how it sounds, how it flows, how it will be perceived. 

Maybe I should put this up on my blog. I don’t know if people will like it or even get it though. If I post it and my poorly advertised blog doesn’t get any traction I’ll probably want to crawl in a hole and die. 

I can also just keep this between myself and my notebook. Then it would probably count as self-care. 

When I used to write in my journal, my keeper of all my darkest secrets and deepest feelings, I used to think about people reading it one day.

I assume Anne Frank wasn’t writing for the sake of anyone else, yet here she is with a best seller.

I need to get a fucking grip. Anne Frank? Really? It’s my ugly truth.

If I were strong and really wanting to get better I’d burn this entry, truly solidifying that this piece was for me and no one else.

But I might want to publish this in my nonexistent book one day. How raw and vulnerable she is! everyone will think. Only I will know what real feelings lie beneath these words, though.

It is now 7:07pm and I have still not amounted to anything and am still unsure if I should post this or not. Good fucking grief.