(This is sort of loosely inspired by this really great article by Tawni O’Dell, about being proud of who you really are (as a writer, especially). Please read it!)

I was never cut out to be valedictorian. Too much work. I almost made the top ten, but didn’t. I was having too much fun. #28 in a class of 400-something. I could just never get it together enough to really buckle down the way I needed to, to make those top grades every single time. You know, those kids who never got anything less than straight A’s? Well, I got a couple B’s. I surely did. I was busy falling in love (a good few times…), breaking up, making friends, having jobs, quitting jobs, being a teenager.

My college experience was much the same. I did well. But I didn’t quite make the grades I needed to get my magna cum laude cords. I was so jealous of everyone who had them. I got my honors cords instead, had just “cum laude” listed after my name in the program. Again, I was too busy… working two jobs to put myself through school, falling out of love, falling in love with my honey, making friends, losing friends, getting married, watching people die, changing my major a good dozen times.

Some day, when I have to write an author’s bio, I want to remember to say that I didn’t get my MFA because I didn’t want one. I got married and pregnant instead, and that was what I wanted. I know they’re going to think of me as a lesser writer because of it, and they’re welcome to go fuck themselves while they’re at it. It’s just a point I want to remember. I’m not very good at remembering these things in the moment. I’m a sensitive type, in the moment – more likely to ball up and cry.

I suspect the rest of my career, my life’s ambitions, my successes will follow that pattern. #28 in a class of 400-something. Almost the smartest, but not. Almost the best, but not. Almost popular, but not. Almost successful, but not.

Obviously those things aren’t the most important to me. I made decisions along the way that demonstrated the fact that I didn’t really want to be all of those things, but instead, wanted to be a little bit of them. I wanted to be close to them, but not. It left me the space to live a life, have experiences, make the connections that inspire all these stories I’m able to write.

I remember being so hard on my little eighteen year-old self, for not making that top ten group. And as a ripple-effect, not getting into the college I wanted. Not getting the scholarships I wanted. I felt like such a failure. How was I supposed to know I was doing everything exactly right? How was I supposed to know, that looking back on it from here, I wouldn’t change a damn thing?

I love that I still have all my old journals and blog entries, dating back to when I was about nineteen. I’m writing a novel about this very particular age, between 18 and 24, when you’re absolutely not a child anymore, and so very barely an adult. Just so ambiguously in between that it’s maddening. Do you remember that age? Before children, before real jobs, when you had time to sit around, in between morning classes and nighttime waitressing shifts, to just drink beer and smoke weed and ponder the intricacies of life?

The 23-year-old me wrote that 24 is when it’s time to grow up. That one is “no longer, at all, a child anymore, but undeniably an adult.” I would have 23-year-old Laura talk to 28-year-old Laura’s husband this morning, and I think he would beg to differ

God, I knew it all back then. I knew everything! What an age that was, when you just know it all. And then, as you get older, you figure out little by little that you just didn’t have a clue.

I wrote this in July of 2004, when I was 23. I don’t even remember who this was about, lol.

Some people:

The way she is sometimes, this person, is like we’re not even inhabitants of the same planet. Or at least, I’m not an inhabitant of her planet. And it makes me mad, because she just kind of floats along, like the world is her game, like she’s about to wake up from one of those really trippy dreams.

But what she doesn’t realize is that she’s not actually dreaming, and that the rest of us have been awake all along.

Some people are just like that. And you stick with them, because you love them, even though it doesn’t really matter, because they are so completely out of it that they can’t tell you from somebody else, from anyone in the whole world.

And dramatic. Oh, how dramatic I was!