By Sophie Becker

 

I must not miss SCABs

 

I’m sorry Marc, I’ve missed my SCAB.

 

Unfortunately this isn’t a rarity for me. It’s happened a few times and that’s unacceptable.

 

Missing any deadline is unacceptable. I know that.

 

Every SCAB’s a struggle. It’s not because I find writing hard. I love writing even though I’m not the best writer.  I do it all the time just for myself.  It’s easy when it’s not for anyone else – when I’m the only person who’s going to judge it.

 

“Just bash it out”, “Write about anything”, “Hardly anyone will read it and no one will judge.” All true.  But even if it were just my best friend or my mum or a random stranger on the other side of the world that I’ll never meet again, I’d panic staring at the blank page worrying that someone other than me was going to read it.

 

I freak out if my housemate reads my notebook, or if someone reads something I’ve written over my shoulder.  Just having someone look at my notes in class is enough to make me feel sick with embarrassment.

 

I sit down to write a SCAB with plenty of time. I get half way through a dozen, but delete them all. I can never chose a topic. I constantly worry whether I sound stupid, pretentious, selfish, preachy, annoying, ignorant, boring, ridiculous, ineloquent, far shitter than anyone else in the class. The list goes on.

 

I’m worried I’m so many horrible things, and it’s going to come across in my writing.

 

I worry that someone out there hates me, reads my SCABs and becomes more infuriated by my very existence. In fact, I worry constantly that everyone hates me which probably is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

It’s different if I’m writing a script or an essay that I’ve spent hours planning and researching. As if I’m someone else. So maybe I should just assume some kind of SCAB persona and write them as if I’m someone completely different.

 

But now, contemplating doing that, I can’t stop thinking about how the name “dj_sbex” will still be on there and everyone will associate it with me.

 

In the end I panic because it’s late and end up writing something I hate anyway. So I should just pick the first thing I hate and go with that.

 

Maybe 1/100 times I’ll end up with something I like though, so I always try to keep going until I get to that. It’s pointless. Because it’s a SCAB and I write them every two weeks. If I hate the one I’ve written, I should submit it and keep writing until I find one I like for next time.

 

So I guess the best thing I can do is force myself to write as many as possible, hope that one day I don’t feel as self conscious about churning them out and pray the heavens that I get better at making decisions. My inability to make a single decision is probably amongst my worse qualities. And likely comes from not trusting my own mind or judgment.

 

So there you go. This is why my SCAB is late.

 

 

The copy scores 76.6 in the Flesch Reading Ease test