I no longer consider myself a writer. While I enjoy the physical process of creating characters, building worlds, and putting pen to page, the writing process as a whole now terrifies me. The idea of ​​someone reading and judging my work sends me into a panic, even if that someone is myself criticizing what I just wrote. I believe this is because I have always seen writing as a way to have control, giving me the ability to find a perfection that I can't have in the real world. As a child, I didn't see this mindset as problematic because in the early moments of my life I thought I was one of the greatest writers in the world. I had the childhood mentality that I could be anything I wanted to be if I put in the work and believed in myself. And I believed in myself more than anything in the world. I had no experience, no knowledge of any writer in the literary canon, nothing to compare my work to. However, as I grew up, read more, and exposed myself to beautiful, talented writers, I began to doubt my abilities. I learned to believe that I could never create worlds as beautiful as Tolkien's, characters as developed as Austen's, prose as entertaining as Shaw's. In my head, if I didn't have the ability to write like them, I wouldn't write at all. So I stopped writing. Of course, I still wrote academic papers and articles for the high school newspaper, but mustering the courage to write a creative piece was nearly impossible. This was one of the darkest points of my life. Without writing, without a creative outlet to express myself, I developed severe anxiety and depression. It was only when I received help for these external problems that I was able to slowly re-establish myself as a