warning: I ended up rambling a lot so this isn't exactly a structured response after the first few sentences, just a vent.

In my English class (high school) another student observed that I always write about war and military history. In fact, she just came up and asked me why. I would have liked her to give me the question in advance so I could actually prepare a response, like an essay, but alas, I couldn't give a good answer right off the top of my head. That happened a couple weeks ago and I'm still feeling self conscious and wondering if I'm a bad person for enjoying writing war stories. I realize that I should just write about whatever I like without worrying what other people think, but I happen to be rather fond of the girl in question so it's easier said than done to not care what she thinks.

Anyway, I've thought about it a lot and I still don't know why I'm so fascinated by war. It just seems unnatural not to be. I can't write about anything else comfortably. Everyone else in the class writes poems about love, about emotional struggles, occasionally about politics, yet all I manage to put to paper is graphic violence. Don't get me wrong, I take pride in my writing and I think I'm fairly good at writing military stories, but I find it difficult to do anything else. I've tried time and time again to write something more positive, more personal, but every time I simply can't bring myself to commit any emotion to paper because whatever emotion it may be, it's not "proper" to put it in writing. I'm not even sure where I got that idea, but it's stuck in my brain and won't come out.

I'm full of emotional energy all the time - I'm a teenager; of course I'm emotional - but I worry that I come off as cold and callused, and now it's 2:00 on a school night and I've got to write a law on infrastructure maintenance by Wednesday and I've barely started because I spent all day curled up in bed praying to a god I don't believe in for these damn Californian wildfires to ease up because I've not had a single breath of clean air for nearly a week. Ugh I just want everything to be sunshine and rainbows (emphasis on the rain; we haven't had any all year) and to be able to express my passion for zoomy jet fighters without feeling judged.