I was a mediocre photographer. It was one of my creative outlets when I was younger, an outlet I thought could perhaps be refined and polished. I took a few great photographs, but I could not be consistent nor obsessive in the necessary way an artist must be. I learned the core components of a beautiful photograph: an image divided into three parts, a sense of tension between the subjects, capturing a moment that cannot be repeated, deliberately engaging or dismissing the viewer, strong contrast in colors with crisp lines…but my intellectual understanding could not translate from lens to film, from film to paper, from paper into chemicals and corrections.

I do not want to be a mediocre writer. I am terrified that only self-delusion will maintain my practice. I do not want fear to drain my energy, but I do not want arrogance and bewilderment to rose tint my words. I don’t want to be a mediocre writer, but right now I am one, and that is okay. What I fear is writing, and writing, and writing, like taking a series of left turns, to find myself right back in the same hemisphere of mediocrity.