Ink Lips, Paper Smile

Apparently, applying to high schools require certain things.

Such as essays.




Well, not essay essays. Not, "20-page-long-college-application" essays. But I need to answer 4 essay questions on my application form, and much to the shock and confusion of everyone who knows me, I have yet to write a single opening word.

"So how are those essays coming?"
"What about your essays?"
"Your essays done yet?"

Every single time I turn around- BAM. Slapped in the face with the pressure of essays.


It's not that I don't think I can write them. I just
God, I don't know.



There is a constant pressure to be good. Even though I don't consider myself a good, quality person as a whole, my one redeemable trait is writing. My capability to mimic and regurgitate words in a mildly pleasing fashion. That's it. Alice Newton, Writer.

If you take the writing away, then I'm nothing. Which I have declared, in my infinite eloquence, as sucktastical.

Because this is it, there is nothing else congratulations you've found it do not pass go: you have reached the end.


That's terrifying and aggravating and depressing and pretty stressful. I went a book sale today, and my aunt picked up a collection of "The Best Teen Writing of 2010" and showed it to me saying assuredly, as if this were an irrefutable fact, that my writing was so much better than all of theirs.

Um, no? It really isn't? They're published. You do realize you're holding a book full of their published writing, right?


Please, please don't mistake me- I am always flattered and humbled and flustered by any and all comments. My cheekbones haven begin to stretch from all the times I squish my cheeks for lack of a better response to people's praise. I am infinitely grateful to have so supportive a family, to have so much backing in my goals. But I don't think I can live up to what they expect me to be, which scares me, because I've got nothing else going for me. I can't take pictures, or sing, or paint incredible art, or help change the world, or be unfailingly sociable like my sister, or do near illegal things with calligraphy like my aunt, or- or anything, really.

So when I get confused glances and wrinkled brows, when there's this pin-drop moment of pause in everyone's plastic smiles as I reply "No, I haven't started the essays yet." I feel like slapping them or slapping myself. Or just burrowing under my bed and never surfacing. Because of course I haven't started the damn essays when everyone is expecting me to pen the Mona Lisa of high school applications. How could I ever live up to those sorts of expectations?

Shockingly enough, the knowledge that I will never be capable of living to those expectations are nowhere near as comforting as one might expect.