i don't know why i ever thought i could ignore my destiny...

When I graduated from the fifth grade, my one line in the ceremony was something along the lines of, "My name is Clara Swanson and when I grow up I want to be an author."  I was 10.

When I was 11, I pulled a book off my dad's bookshelf called How To Write Fiction.  The first page of the introduction more or less said, "Straight-A students can't write fiction.  They never have any questions about the world around them, they never wonder why, because they already know everything."  I immediately slammed it shut and shoved it as far back to the wall as I could.

Now, that straight-A business is total bullshit.  The book was obviously written by a straight-C student at best, one who had obviously not met me and my outrageous imagination.  As an 11-year-old, though, I'd never read anything in a book that didn't hold some degree of truth, so throughout the universally jading experience of surviving 3-6 years at Lynch Middle School I edited my impractical dream, poured my angsty adolescent soul into poetry and journaling, and pushed my lexophilia to the hobby side of the spectrum.

But like I said, you can't escape your destiny.

And now that I am immersed in Figuring Out My Life, Defining My Identity, and Becoming A Real Person, my destiny has caught up to me.  Now I have a lot of catching up to do...

• I love blogging.  I'm blog-obsessed.  I read as many of my classmates' blogs as I can get my hands on, and I make notes and outlines in my planner throughout the week on blog topics I'm pumped to write next.  I am committed to this.
• I am that restaurant hostess who jots lines of poems, essays, stories, and even postcards in the margins of outdated takeout menus and folds them into tiny, tiny squares to shove in my pockets to unfold and leave out around my room "to expand upon at a later date."
• I spend my days drafting content for different campaigns.  This is very short, but still an exercise in the writing side of the brain, whatever side that is...
• I decided (of my own accord) to participate in National Novel Writing Month this year -- after Alex spent most of middle school and high school trying to convince me to join him.  Take that, How To Write Fiction author!  Take that, my dear Alexander!  If I thought I would have time to sleep at some point in November, though, I was dead wrong.
• Also of my own accord, I volunteered to be my class correspondent -- to gather, arrange, and present news items from my St. Olaf classmates now scattered all over the globe.  This involves, predictably, some actual correspondence, as well as writing and editing a cohesive and appealing document.
• I'm managing (uncharacteristically) to keep in touch with a ton of really important people.  I've written and received an impressive number of letters, postcards, emails, Facebook messages, and texts.  This will be a point of constant improvement, but at least it doesn't make me cringe anymore.

I have a journal on my bedside trunk, a pen in my possession, and an eye out for open mics at all times.  I've got my comprehensive toolbelt of genres pretty much covered.  The words course through my very veins, and I can tell that I'm embracing my destiny now because something has slid into place in my solar plexus, like I've stopped fighting this thing that is a part of me.  Vocation Part I.

Still, Leo Tolstoy laid me flat with his whole "write or live" dilemma (forget his anarchic theory, but what a genius!)  He realized -- or decided -- at some point that man does not have time and energy to be both a writer and a real person in his life.  So, predictably, he gave up writing for decades in order to travel, start a commune, etc. before returning to the pen when he felt death coming.  Tolstoy's philosophy changed during his dry spell, became much more gritty and graspable.  He loved to write.  But who can write something true to the world who has not experienced the world and its truths?

But then, who can resist her destiny?

...Is destiny a destination, or is it the way we uncover our path through the world to our truths?