Sad Day

I just received an email from the professor who is coordinating the scholarships for the English department. She told me that I will not be awarded any of the scholarships. I want to cry, but I need to be happy that I gave it a try. I really wanted to win this, and I would have loved to have some financial help through my last semester, but it'll be okay. I'll be fine.

It's hard not to associate this with negativity. I try to put myself out where I can risk failure or success and I hope for the latter, but it's not easy to succeed sometimes. This is discouraging, but I know eventually I'll be rewarded for everything I've gone through. I have to believe that.

I also just registered for my last semester. Fiction workshop and feature writing, along with three anthropology classes. Both writing classes sound like great learning experiences for me, and I have Approach to Composition this summer which will also help me write better.

Two and a half more weeks of this semester. I've gotten a lot out of these past few months. I love school, I love learning, but I hope that after it's over I can use everything I've learned to write the things I've always wanted to write. And that I will be able to devote the time to those projects at last. I want to think about writing today, not a "stable job," because I need to be positive and writing is what makes me happy.

All I Hear Around Here is an Echo

Last night I couldn't go to sleep until I wrote an article that I had in mind. It was about social anxiety and I wrote it for our school newspaper, The Echo. It's about 600 words in length and focuses on my experiences with anxiety, my struggles in school, and the eventual help I received in counseling. My aim is to educate other students who have social anxiety and don't know what it is or what to do, and to show that it's possible to overcome it.

It felt so good to have it written. I love getting something completed, and this is the first writing assignment I've ever given myself that I've finished. Now I'm nervous. I know an editor at The Echo and I could talk to her about whether or not they'd be interested in running it, but I'm starting to succumb to the self-doubt. Negative thoughts are getting to me. I need some confidence. It's times like these I wish someone was reading this thing. . .