This article might seem choppy and unsupported and spontaneous. It might feel unorganized and lack flow, but I really don't care anymore because I just want to get just some of my endless thoughts down. Just some of them.

For a great deal of my life, I took a tremendous pride in my writing. It gave me a creative outlet to spill out all the antics of my imagination, to channel all my negative energy into something beautiful, and to just voice my feelings and thoughts into words that I could reread again and again forever. Even as an elementary schoolers, I kept endless journals and diaries, and there were multiple times where I even tried to start my own novels that I one day planned to publish.

It was when a kid author visited my fourth grade classroom that the idea of becoming a publishing writer consumed me. I spent that summer obsessed with a new software feature that I had discovered known as "google docs," slaving my hours away in front of a computer monitor working on my first novel, a fantasy-based book about special elves with powers.

It was genius. It was my everything. It was also kind of a rip-off of Percy Jackson.

Ecstatic is an understatement for the excitement I felt when I would email the latest chapter to all my friends for their feedback. There was some negative criticism that bothered me on occasion, but there were always positive comments that would fuel my esteem and accelerate my motivation to continue.

Even my dad took it upon himself to read it, and when he discovered that it wasn't complete and utter bull-crap like he was expecting, his dreams of me becoming a child author started overpowering even my own.

Perhaps I should've felt grateful that my dad putting in so much effort to support my dream, but his overall response to my novel became overwhelming.

I found myself wanting to write less and less, which lead him to push me to continue harder and harder. Pretty quickly, what had started as a fantastical dream turned hobby had transformed itself into a burden.

Before I knew it, that novel came to a halt before the main plot line could even begin. And so did my novel after that. And its rewrite after that.

I think that part of my problem is that I feel overwhelmed too easily. The truth is, subjective expectations absolutely terrify me.

When it comes to something like writing and art, people all have their own tastes and judgments. I think what happens to me is that once people start expecting a certain quality of content that they're used to receiving, I start raising my expectations for myself in an attempt to overcompensate meeting them.

And then come Insecurity and Laziness into play. I found myself despising every word I of those novels that I wrote. I found the direction that my stories were going in distasteful. My own creations had completely butchered the original ideas I had swimming in my brain. If even I, the writer, didn't enjoy what I was writing, why was I even bothering it?

So about a year ago, I quit novel-writing all together.

Fast-forward a couple months, and I found myself joining a platform called The Odyssey. It was kind of a spontaneous decision that I should've probably given more thought on, but before I knew it, I found myself writing and sharing my very first article. It was a comedic, yet heartwarming piece (at least I hope it was heartwarming piece), inspired by some of the recent events that had happened in my life at that time.

It was the first time that I had written something outside of school just for fun in a long time. I don't think there's a single piece I've been prouder of.

But now looking back, I absolutely can't stand it.

What the heck was I thinking? Please hit me with a stop sign.

I've lost the drive that I once had when I first started writing for this platform. I don't like my sentence structures. I don't like the expressions I use. I don't know what my writing style even is anymore.

Once again, I've found myself pulled deep under writer's block.

It's not a matter of not knowing what to write. That's the easy part. I have too many things that I want to write about. I just can't seem to actually write it. No matter what I do, it just seems to suck.

And frankly, I'm terrified. Not just because I'm afraid of being forced into retirement for missing article submission deadlines, but because I'm nearly face to face with possibly some of the most important essays that I'll ever write.

And those are my college application essays.

If you were expecting a sudden turn-around, motivational, happy-sunshine conclusion to this article, then you'll have to find that on some of my previous publications. There's no great, life-altering ending to this article solely because I don't yet have closure on this issue. I'm dreading even rereading this article because the last thing I want to do is cringe and regret spending so much time on another one of my pieces.

But for now, just know that if my content seems to only be going downhill from here, it's because it'll take some time for me to build the momentum to bring it back up again.

Thanks for being patient with me.