I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

The title for this was originally going to be "I Am Myself", but considering what's been happening the past week or so, this one's probably more fitting. It's the unashamed product of tooling around in the title text-box for a few minutes trying to think of something that sounded intelligent. I really do like making the titles of my blog posts sound intelligent because I don't have anything else to put there, oh well.

The quote above is from the first stanza (you can call it a stanza, right? I hear IB doesn't mind) of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, (one of) the poem(s) Joanna is doing for her English EE. I guess it's sorta apt too.

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I wrote a weird little article called "I Hate Past Me" for the latest issue of !NK, written mostly out of desperation of having to submit an article (my second, markedly saner article was written after this one) and not having enough articles in the issue. This was originally my SYF idea, though I don't think I ever submitted it for SYF. I felt like I was selling my soul writing this for !NK.

But this pretty much describes my situation all the time, and more so now than ever, maybe:

Maybe I’m the one that’s being a coward here. I’m the one afraid to face the fact that these were the things that I did once, the things that I once thought were completely rational, justified and acceptable. I can’t acknowledge that Past Me is Present Me because to me, she is not me, because she is so foreign and utterly unexplainable that it scares me, so I disassociate myself from her.

Or maybe I’m just jealous of her, because some of the things she does are so daring and beautiful that I know that Present Me could never repeat such things. She can make friends that I can’t fathom ever having made friends with because they’re just so awesome. She can be vivacious and full of consummate wit in front of a crowd while I sit there as stiff and closed-up as an oyster clinging to a rock on the bottom of the ocean. Sometimes I read the things she writes and they make me want to cry. I just can’t live up to her.

I haven't written in ages, which is terribly inconvenient considering that I actually have a deadline to meet this time. Well, I wrote something a few days ago, but that was more of a purging-type thing than anything else. I feel like I've been sucked dry; whether of time, energy or mind is yet to be determined.

I'm scared I won't be able to revert to my previous state of being a writer and writing things and having the inspiration to write things. My mentorship situation is quite unfortunate in that there isn't enough time for me to work the idea I have a plan for so I'm resorting to the other idea I don't have a plan for. It's scary because I still haven't gotten down to writing the damn thing, although now I actually have a framework for it. And I should be getting down to it but because I have TOK drafts and History IA waiting for me (thank god I don't have anything else, though, like Bio IAs and 1000-word EE drafts) I've just been stuck in an eternal stasis between all of them.

And all of this is somehow important because it was the me of the past who made the decisions and told people, including herself, most of all herself, I can do this, give me the chance, trust me.

If I can't I shouldn't even have thought I could in the first place.

I didn't actually plan to write all that, oh dear.

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Today I flipped open my spanking new school magazine (GOSH IT'S HARDCOVER AND SQUARE AND HARDCOVER THIS IS POSITIVELY DECADENT) to find The Morning shamelessly plagiarised by a certain G. Fong. I don't recall there being a person by the surname of Fong in my class, though, so it's probably more of an identity crisis than anything else.

I have taped this page to the pages before and after it in case my parents ever decide to pick up the magazine and drool all over its HARDCOVER DECADENCE.

So anyway, The Morning has become my go-to piece for "ooh-you're-a-writer-show-me-some-writing" incidents, hence the initial posting of it on Facebook. One of these recent incidents involves a request by my teacher for pieces to include in various school publications. I submitted this one because ah heck I put it on Facebook anyway it doesn't matter anyway.

I find this very embarrassing, partly due to the fact that it's in a school magazine, but also because I've been posting this piece everywhere. It feels like I'm throwing this piece away, like it doesn't mean anything to me, even though it does. I actually really like this one and I'd really prefer to keep it close to my chest, posting it in places where it's definitely me posting it deliberately, whether on Facebook or in a competition anthology or maybe even one day an actual anthology.

Not in a school magazine for parents (especially my parents) to flip to randomly and read thinking oh look who's this strange girl and why does she write such depressing things.

I don't feel like what I write, or at least, what I've written, represents the school, so that's one of the reasons why I'm uncomfortable about it. I can't think of the other reasons right now. As thus, in a way, I'm happy that my identity for this one is at least partway masked by this G. Fong, although this is rendered fully useless by the fact that most people that follow me on Facebook have a functioning short-term memory.

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Why is this so rambly I don't even.

I don't even know how to end this this is terrible.