There are spiders in my brain.

There is no better way to explain why I stopped writing -- Spiders! They crawl around with their hairy legs and they tell me that my writing is no better than a piece of trash on the street. Have you ever heard "Fireworks" by Katy Perry? " Do you ever feel like a plastic bag?" Nope! But my writing sure does! I stopped writing around age 14. My inner editor finally got the best of me and decided to edit my short stories into one word of unfinished bullshit. I closed my word documents for good and decided that there was no way that writing is what I'm meant to do. "If this is my dream.... I should be good at it right?" I thought to myself constantly. So I just gave up completely. I wasn't even placing in competitions for writing anymore and there were people that wrote way better than me that were exactly my age.

Now, at age 17, I want that talent back. I realize that there's no way that anyone can be better than me because I am me. No one will have the exact same ideas as me and no one will articulate them in the way that I do. No matter how hard someone tries to mimic what I write, they will never be successful. And even if it's a piece of garbage by my standards, it's beautiful by someone else's. When I was 15, I got back into writing for a short time. I started with writing poems and then short stories and then I finally learned guitar so that I could start writing songs. Then, as soon as I became proud of what I did again, I quit. I stopped writing short stories, my poems lacked substance and meaning, and I stuck to songwriting. Now, I'm in an epic battle with writer's block. To combat that, I'm writing for the odyssey. There's no way that I can be stopped from writing. No matter what, I always end up going back to it. So each week, I'm gonna tell those spiders in my brain to shut the f*ck up and let me write.