This is banal.

I haven't been writing. Creeping doubts fill my mind like...
like... See? I don't even have a handle on basic hyperbolic similes. I don't know how your mind works, but I get flashes of prescient vision all the time. I hear myself in twenty years saying, "I remember when I was a writer," talking, I guess, about those scant years in high school. Who knows? It's embarrassing to stall in a sentence and wonder what the next word was.

"You know, like the opposite of sad, sort of."
"Do you mean 'happy'?"
"Yeah, I guess."

I went back to Oregon this winter and was accosted by a strange set of emotions. My asshole friends are still assholes. My critical, my hypocritical, my ugly, my broken
(I feel like I started writing "New Collosus" right there)
friends are still those people, the same, or something pretty much the same.

And there's comfort there. You don't befriend the people I do hoping they'll drastically change in two years. I do, however, sense a deep, drastic change in myself, like how girls become women and vice versa. Or I pretend I feel something, but I pretend hard enough that it's psychosomatic and when my friends don't notice the deep, dark changes, then they must not be real.
I can't be validated.

I fear, though, that the changes are actually an increase in pomp and condescension. I wanted to post a piece a month ago that sounded like,

"Oh, yeah, Joel, he's annoying now. It's like New York, this, New York, that. He pretends like he doesn't judge me, but if there's any character that he can't play, it's himself. But, like, he's to be pitied, not me, obviously."

It was going to be about 20x longer and profanity-heavy, so it could match ANY of my friends.

Self-doubt is something to be fought constantly, but only if you are worth something. If you're worthless, then you might as well give up the fight.

You know what? Most of the time I'm pained to see inaction it's because I fear it in my own life.

Pitiful.