did you cut your hands on me?

Last Monday I sat in my seat at the end of my calculus class, overhearing bits and pieces of the conversation going on in front of me.  They were talking about their English essays, how difficult or easy it was to get a perfect score from an AP grader, how we had to rewrite one of the essays from our midterm exam.  Since English class is not very high on the my list of things to worry about, I began to tune out the conversation as it turned toward writing in general, and, as all conversations with seniors in high school inevitably do, the future -- until I heard someone say something that rang inside me loud and clear.

"... I mean, I want to do something real with my life."

Ugh.  I wasn't sure that anyone heard her say it besides me, or if anyone even noticed anything strange about it, but my blood practically began to boil.  I looked around me to see if anybody near me had heard the same thing I had, but not one of them seemed to register exactly the weight of her words.

I want to do something real with my life.  Real.  You could even hear the italics in her voice! And when I looked around me and not one person seemed to be cut by those words the same way I was.  How could they not realize how upsetting and annoying and hurtful that statement was?

I can't deny that I understood what she was trying to say.  I understood that she meant that she didn't want to put so much of her fragile future into so uncertain a field; a field so cutthroat and judgmental and bitter.  Writing as a career is uncertain; it's difficult.  And so, in a way, I understood what she was saying, but that didn't upset me any less.

I couldn't help but take it personally.  Even though I don't think I want to be a novelist or a journalist as a career either, her words cut through my soft skin like a knife.  And I was angry.  Who was she to decide what was real and what was not? How could she thrust a statement like that into existence so easily, so casually?

I guess the reason I felt so personally offended by her dismissal of writing as a career is that I honestly have not loved anything the same way that I love writing.  Writing is not just learning or solving or memorizing.  It is not juxtaposing facts without faces that carry no emotional significance.  Perhaps it doesn't cure cancer; perhaps it doesn't build hospitals; perhaps it doesn't design jet engines.  Perhaps it is little black marks on paper -- but it is so much more.  It is ideas.  It is the preservation of the person I am and the thoughts I am thinking here and now.  And it can convey so much, it can mean so much.

How is the perfect documentation of a person, of a time period, of thoughts and ideas and truth, not significant? How is that not real?

What I am discovering through blogging is that I have something to say.  And writing these intimate, personal thoughts and emotions and getting the reactions that I have been getting has made me feel real in a way that I have never felt in my entire life.  More real than getting an A on a calculus test, more real than winning a state championship in swimming, more real than being accepted to a college.  I finally can tangibly feel that my thoughts have consequence.  I may not be making money or curing cancer or saving lives, but I am communicating.  I am making people think.

And that, to me, is making me real in a way that I have never been in my life.