Tiffany Rambles

I'm practically a Determinator (though I'm not into the whole 'no price is too great to pay for success' crap), so being scared doesn't mean giving up. For me, it may mean wasting an hour of my night curling into a tight ball, crying like a little kid and threatening the determinator within me that I'm gonna give up. In fact, I'm not ashamed to admit that that's exactly what I did last night.

It's always an empty threat though.

I'm not a mess anymore. When I was in college, I cried every night. But I NEED to cry every now and then.  Crying, at least for me, is a way of gathering up all the things I'm terrified of and letting them all out at once instead of letting them simmer in my mind every single day until I get depressed. Even though yesterday was one of those days where I felt extremely happy to be alive, I still ended up breaking down. So what are the things I'm so afraid of?

• Love doesn't terrify me as much as it used to, but holy shit...me and Matthew have been together for 10 months. That's almost a year. For all you people who have been in relationships that have lasted years, this may not seem like a big deal. It's a big deal to me. First, he really actually loves me. You don't understand how much this blows my mind. I spent so much time thinking no guy could ever really actually love me, at least not for longer than a couple of weeks. Before Matthew, none of my relationships lasted longer than 3 months, if they even lasted that long. For a long time, I used to think it was because I wasn't pretty enough or smart enough or interesting enough, but I refuse to attribute every break-up to me not being 'the best.' It's not always my fault. It's silly to think so. Still, when I cried last night, I wondered if I was boring to Matthew, or if I could ever make up for how clingy I was in college. It's like...I can't get over how so very pitiful I was. God, I hate being pitiful. Which brings me to my next point...
• I'm terrified of embarrassing myself. Now that I'm an editor and businesswoman and freelance writer, my cloudcuckoolander attributes become more and more out of place. While I want to accept that yes, I can't pronounce many words and my memory is just not up to par sometimes, I still want to shoot myself when I say something wrong and someone goes, "God, you're an editor/businesswoman/writer. I'm disappointed in you. How could you speak so incorrectly?" I mean, I grew up speaking slang. Saying things incorrectly mean very little to me. It's writing things incorrectly that bother me. Plus, I'm NOT a grammar editor. I'm a content editor, damn it.
• I want to prove to people that me taking a break from college to write and work on my own business was NOT some big mistake. At the same time, I hate hate hate that I want to prove anything to anyone. I sincerely just want to say, "Fuck everybody else." I can't say it just yet. As far as I can tell, the only way to prove to them that I'm not messing up is by having money in general, a license and money saved away to get a car, and a steady job to assist the business. But hell, it's really going to take me lots of time and hard work to get there, and I get afraid because it feels so far away.
• Yknow, sometimes you get afraid that the success won't come or that, if it does come, it won't complete your life the way you thought it would. Then you freeze. You get stuck in wanting, wanting, wanting and don't take action. I sincerely feel like this is happening to me. There is NO real excuse for why I haven't been writing more. There are all these contests I can enter into, all these novels I can be working on, all these articles I could be finishing. And yeah, the editing and reviewing business does take a lot of my time, but seriously wtf. I don't have an out-of-the-house job right now, I don't have classes, and I don't have a crazy social life. I can write. Back when I was doing the first couple of drafts of Savior of the Damned, I wrote whenever I could find any time to write. What ever happened to that shit? Why did I stop? I know why. Because I'm scared. I'm scared of fifty thousand little things that I always tell writers not to be afraid of when all they need to worry about is writing the damn thing.

So now that I've cried, I say it's time to put it all behind me until the next time the overwhelmed kid in me needs out. After I post this, I'm finishing the first article for my Honest Crits blog tour and writing at least 1-2 pages of Dream Catcher. Then I'm gonna do some editing. As always, here are my two most recent favorite songs: