What’s that you say? “You’ve been blogging for a total of one day. You simply are not allowed a throwback post!” Oh wait, you can’t say anything if you don’t even exist. That’s the beauty of having zero readers except for your mother and that one friend who feels like she has to be supportive but secretly just wants to feel slightly better about her own life by reading what a failure yours is. You can pretty much do whatever you want. So onward I go.

My first post here reminds me of a journal I wrote almost a year ago titled, “How I Started Writing Again.” The name is ironic, considering I was guilted (did you know “guilted” isn’t actually a word?? I know, I’m shocked too) into writing consistently for a total of 72 hours before I threw in that tear-stained towel and started watching HGTV on Netflix and drinking fake champagne out of the bottle again as my nightly routine.

Anyway, here it is:

“So I settled in for a typical week night in Willmar. This means I was nestled into the corner of my couch, my heated blanket wrapped around my shoulders (for any of you that have never indulged in the wonders of a heated blanket, it feels like you’re being hugged by a herd of heavenly sheep that have been basking in the sunshine for three hours. It is amazing), a glass of whiskey in one hand and a bag of caramel popcorn in the other. I chose the movie I was about to watch because the description said something about a twenty-something year old who can’t quite grow up and I was like, “Hey! Sounds like me!” Anyway, the movie was like one minute in and it started doing this montage of scenes when the main character was in high school having fun with her friends. And then one of the actresses appeared on screen and I spit whiskey all over my already stained v-neck and brother’s old hole-strewn pj pants.

Because I knew that girl. I went to high school with that girl. I remember learning choreography in choir with that girl*. I remember that girl playing some yellow-feather clad character in Seuss the Musical freshman year of high school**. I looked from the girl to my whiskey-stained slacker outfit, to the caramel popcorn crumbs littering my shoulders like dandruff and I thought, shit. Shit, shit, shit. I did what any normal person would do. I immediately went through mutual friends to stalk her Facebook page. Sure enough, information about the movie was right there on her timeline. I saw she lives in Portland now. There was a smiling picture of her and her fiancé splayed across the top of the screen. Huh.

A feeling surged through me. It felt something like embarrassment. Shame. Here was this girl, living in Portland, acting in movies. And here I was, a year behind her, watching said movies, living in the middle of nowhere two hours away from the town we both grew up in, my clothes covered in whiskey and popcorn crumbs, with all my dreams and stubs of writing projects tucked away in the bottom of my desk. The distance between me and this success that can be achieved was closed. I finally realized I’d been lying to myself. I told myself my writing couldn’t lead to anything, that it couldn’t lead to anything. Because of the nobody that I was. Because of the nowhere I grew up. But this girl proved that people just like me could work for something that people would tell girls like us is impossible, and actually succeed. So shit. I immediately set down the popcorn and the whiskey (okay I took a swig of the whiskey first, you caught me) and opened a word document. And I wrote. And I never stopped***.”

*She learned choreography. I learned how to look like a dying dolphin wearing a blue robe trying to dance on shore.

**It’s creepy that I remember this.

***Except for the fact I did. I gave up embarrassingly quickly. But no more!