I did the girl thing and briefly wanted to be a marine biologist when I was eight.

By the time I was ten, I knew that I did not want to be a figure skater. [Fucking bitches.]

My pre-pubescent angst kicked in around eleven, and I didn't want to do anything but write. Not professionally, but always. You got between me and my writing and you got a screaming tearful flying ball of fists and teeth. I was prodigious, churning out dozens of stories a month, never editing, barely blinking.

This evolved into pubescent angst, and settled for some time. During highschool I was awarded an incredibly generous scholarship to any school in Canada. History professor? Own a bar? [What was I thinking, guh.]

Then something snapped in the middle of Grade 11. I couldn't take it. The people around me, looking at me, thinking about me, talking about me, judging me. I hid under layers and layers of false personality until one day I cracked and hit some girl I'd never seen before. Knocked her out.

"Anger Management Problem! Requires Counselling or Suspension!"

I found this funny. I wasn't angry. [Scared, maybe?]

So I went to my first counselling session with a grain of salt, ready to swallow if necessary. The school had this guy coming once a week from family services. This fact made me defensive too; there had been a bit of a battle for my mom to keep my brother and me at one point.

He was nice. Didn't really ask leading questions, mostly about innocuous, everyday sort of stuff.

"What's your favourite class?"

"Do you like sports?"

"What are you reading, that looks good."

I visited him every Tuesday during Fashion [glorified Sewing] for a bit over a month.

Then I cracked again.

One of my friends found me sobbing in the girls' washroom, pressed up against the corner of the stall, half behind the sweaty toilet. It took her almost twenty minutes to pry me out. It was a Tuesday [coincidence? probably not] so Alex was in the school. They sat me down in his janitor's closet of an office and he stood and just looked at me.

I wanted to scream at him to stop looking. What the fuck was he looking at? But I just sat there and slowly pushed myself as deeply into the chair and as far away from him as I could. [Not far.]

"I don't think you should be in school."

I dropped out a week later and commenced three years of medication, counselling, and fear. [Bye, bye, scholarship...]

During this time, all I wanted to be when I grew up was normal. [Let's not get into that old argument.] I had kept up the writing. Got published in a small press anthology. Wished it had been something better.

A bit of change of scenery, and things started to really look up. I got into recreational drugs. I started having sex for fun. I became interested in what was going on around me more than what was in my head. [Perhaps a first.]

I tried school again. Jewellery. The certificate course was only three and a half months long, so I wasn't too worried about getting sketched out. It was a short enough time that I could probably stay interested. And I did, just barely. Near the end it got hard to stop myself from going out into the sculpture forest back of the school and smash the shit outta everything, smash the noise outta my head.

School finished. I had done something. I actually had a certificate that said that I was educatable. [Not like a diploma or anything, but better than nothing.]

I left the winter wastes behind and some friends helped me move to Toronto. Here, I was confused.

What do you want to do?

I found myself answering the question wrong; not as it had been asked, but as "What do you think you can do?"

So I served coffee.

I am an amazing server. Listen to the uneducated hick slang that I throw around and you may not believe it. But you put an asshole of an uptight business man in front of me, wanting his afternoon coffee, and I will come out of it with a tip bigger than the price.

The job was fine for awhile. My bosses put me on proof-reading their website, correcting the grammar, punctuation, and [oh god!] the spelling of a Dutch immigrant. They had free wireless in-house. I could eat whatever I wanted.

But the nights when I would come home and stare at the ceiling with blank eyes were steadily increasing. I wanted a better job. [More money.]

So I got a better job. [More money...sorta.]

And here I am. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I go through nights of joy when I "decide" to go back to school, get something in programming. And days of hell when I feel like I can never do anything, ever.

But at one point, about three months ago, I figured I could at least do something in the evenings. After considering going back to highschool [discarded!], I spent a bit of time talking with the roomates and got myself into Continuing Ed. at George Brown College.

Tonight I wrote my exam for Essential Grammar for Editors, the first course required for their editing certificate. [Fuckin' aced it.]

I don't have the spine to be an editor. But maybe this can get me closer to being left alone with my writing.