The Brutal Truth

You start out with an itch, an annoying sensation at the back of your mind poking at you, urging you to write. You think up all these great concepts for ghost stories, love stories, how-my-life-is and what-I-ate-for-breakfast-today stories. You end up frustrated because everyone else is writing about that and it would take up too much energy to come up with a piece that would be considered unique. So you decide to write about something that nobody really writes about (although there’s a perfectly good reason why nobody writes about it). You decide to write about being a dormer.
The stage is set, you only need to start. You fumble for words but everything’s been used. Who hasn’t talked about the dirty toilets, the bad cooking, the musty odours or the half-baked rules? Who hasn’t written about being annoyed by the cats that spawn out offspring in hordes or the rather ambiguous way to answer the paging system: “coming!”? Who hasn’t ended their essay on a rainbow-and-butterflies note that despite all of the really negative aspects, dorm life is made worthwhile by the love, friendship and all the other phoney flowery words that supposedly spring from bonds between dormers? You decide that you are still too young to have your writing career end on such a sad article. You do not write about the above-mentioned things.
By this time, you are now so tired of thinking and your brain is finally so fried that you give up and decide to write the honest truth. Your masterpiece turns out to be a single sentence: “There is nothing uniquely amazing about being a dormer only that for a brief moment in your life you are allowed to feel the amazing rush of becoming independent (and all that this entails) in a place where three hundred other people are having the same experience.” No one understands your final piece and you end up in the same place you started, a blank blob of nothingness in an endless sea of faces.