Notebooks

In this post, I briefly discussed my fear of sharing. Today, I'm gonna briefly discuss my fear of deciding.

I have dozens of notebooks. I love them! Writing in them is so fun and exciting... So why are the majority of them blank?

It's hard for me to take that "big step" of writing in a notebook for the first time. Suddenly, all the potential that the notebook had when I first bought it is destroyed. It becomes a planner. It becomes a song book. It becomes a messy mixture of drawings, lists, and ideas. It's no longer a journal. It's no longer a response log. It's no longer a fashion design book. All of its previously-held possibilities are stripped from it, and it becomes one thing, or a disorganized mixture of incongruous things.*

Similarly, it's hard for me to make decisions about college, careers, and my future in general. All the potential, all the possibilities I'd previously had to choose from are gone. With each additional decision I make, a potential future, a potential life, dies. If I choose to go to college A, the versions of me that chose to go to colleges B-Z die. If  I choose to become an artist, all the other versions of me that chose other careers will die. The astrophysicist dies, the actress dies, the teacher dies. Maybe two of them can live together, simultaneously, but, even with the option of cohabitation, countless versions of me will die. You can only do so many things in one lifetime.

This is making me think of the episode "Remedial Chaos Theory" from season 3 of Community. If you haven't seen Community, or if you haven't gotten that far in it, I highly suggest you make your way up to it.

"I wonder what happened in all those other timelines."

*Wow, that's a little cheesy. I'm cringing just the tiniest bit at that, and I wrote it. Ich.

Oops!

I've been just a tiny bit busy.
Since I last wrote, I've finished all 3 seasons of Community, started applying to colleges, decided that maybe I want to be a screenplay writer, and come up with an awesome idea for a Halloween costume that I won't share quite yet.

If I want to be a writer, I should probably write, right? So you can expect more from me now!
I don't have any followers at the moment, but my blog gets multiple views every time I post something, so there has to be someone reading these other than my best friend (hi, Rachel!). If you're that someone, I'd love to know!

I'm on my school's Academic Decathlon team, and part of Academic Decathlon competitions is giving impromptu speeches, so we've been practicing those lately. I have fairly significant stage fright, so, when I first started giving impromptus, I would just blank, and get nervous, which would make me pace, which would make the weak points I'd sometimes manage to stammer out even weaker by distracting my audience. Last weekend, however, I spent an hour or two responding to practice prompts, and now I am, if I may say so myself, a pretty good impromptu speaker. I spoke for the entire team last Monday and got a good number of laughs and compliments!
I've often thought, Hey. I could be an actor. I act things out by myself all the time (don't judge me; I can't drive and I don't live near anyone my age, so I'm alone a lot), and I normally do pretty well at it! There are a few problems with that idea, though. I have bad stage fright, and I've never really acted in public before. Maybe if someone told me I was a good actor, I'd have more confidence, and be able to act in public, but, because no one ever has, I can't. I've heard that some people, when they act, use their lack of confidence to help them get into another role, so they can forget about their self-doubts.

Wow, so, I started this post yesterday. Today, I was in a head-on collision with another car on my way to school. No real injuries, but this post's inspiration is just gone, at least temporarily. Maybe I'll finish it later.