Ha. Yes, imagination is quite a wonderful and magical thing if you are living. If not, it is a depressing and hollowing power. For me, as for most, it is both. Sometimes my imagination is my lifesaver—it picks me up when I am down and allows me to let myself enjoy life—for that one millisecond that I forget everything. However, most often I find it a terrible source of pain.

I can imagine all day long that I am going be a tall, thin, and successful woman someday in the near future, but that will never happen. I am but a short and overweight teenager who is never going to accomplish anything worthwhile. Of course the true downside of imagination is that you can never get rid of it, for at this very moment I still don’t accept the previous sentence; in the back of my mind I still have a hope that I will be successful, in fact maybe this “literary” attempt will even do it for me. I know that it is amazingly hurtful when one realizes they can not accomplish everything, but do we ever really realize that? I suppose I shan’t know till I grow up more.

“Carpe diem” is an excellent idea. We must seize the day, but is it possible? Of course it is. Why would it not be? I am capable of seizing this day, this very moment, and am able to do something productive with it. Have I ever done that though? Have I ever truly taken a perfect moment and done something stupendous with it? No, but have any of us?

I have followed this mantra scarcely in my life; naturally, one must take into account my age, 16, which only came about a few days ago. So, of course I haven’t begun to “live my life,” nor have I begun to do anything with even an inkling of importance. (Well, now I have lost my train of thought and have no idea where I was going with this depressing statement.) What I do know is that I am supposed to do something—anything—with my life, and the very “deep” and never-aging question is, “But what?”. Who knows.

I love to be “creative.” I love to try to do things that I believe no one has ever tried before, but of course they have. Anything that I do on a creative whim will only be redundant due to someone else’s previous endeavor. That fact still can not keep me from trying, but I never do anything of great importance and the reason for this is that I am always trying to do something that will bring me recognition. No matter how hard I try to convince myself of otherwise, it is impossible to break the habit.

I tell myself often that I wish to do whatever it is I am attempting simply to do it, but that is certainly not the case. I do things to prove to myself I can do them. No. I do things in order to make myself feel superior to others. That is an extremely discouraging and disgusting remark. I must be “creative” to make myself feel useful.

Do we ever grow out of “amateurity”? Probably not; however, we all believe we have. We are all amateurs at life and will be until the day we leave this earth, yet neither I nor anyone else I know will ever admit that. Why is that we are so involved in making ourselves so important? Life is the importance of living—not fame, fortune, and beauty. Knowledge is the basis of life, I believe. Yes, I know that love is the true power of us all, but of course one must “know” this in order to practice it.

We all have “many roads” on which we can travel, but how many of us travel just one and do it well? I know at this point in my life that I will probably go bounding down at least four hundred by the time I am twenty three, but will spend most of my time backtracking and getting caught in bushes. I suppose we are meant to learn from these experiences and I believe most of us try to do that at least once in a while, but again, do any of us truly do it? No; of course, I know that you can ask this ridiculous question about anything and still come up with the same answer, considering the ambiguity of the thing asked. Oh well, this is simply an amateur attempting to grasp what is occurring in her life and failing miserably at the process.

I am only a person who feels and thinks and believes they know best. I am human and I am me. I do not understand why I do the things I do, but I do know that I do them. I know that life will not be what I expect of it; especially considering I do not expect anything (at least I try to tell myself this). We are here to help each other, yet how can I help someone if I do not know me and my own troubles? I’ve been told often that you find the answers to your problems by helping someone else. I see the logic in this statement, but can not seem to get over my own selfish worries in order to give myself fully to other person. Does that make me horrible? No, I don’t think so. Does that make me successful? Hell no. Does that make me human? Oh yeah.

I guess I am simply trying to categorize my own feelings while I “grow up.” I never appreciated that statement. Where am I growing to? The sky? However, when I actually ponder the statement, I come to realize how true it is. We are growing “up” to the responsibilities of adulthood. That sentence automatically brings to mind such words as: bills, mortgages, taxes . . . but those are not the responsibilities that I dread. I dread having to get up in the morning and pretend that I am who I am and that I know everything. I dread having to live with the responsibility the knowledge of still being an amateur and not being able to show it brings. I dread not being able to act like a child.

I suppose though that I truly now don’t even grasp the importance of my saying this because I still go through bouts of wanting to be treated like an “adult” and wanting to be babied like a child. It is hard to grow up—it must be, yet it is a required change as most things are. I only hope that I am able to keep my maturity at bay at least a few minutes every day.