Sometimes, I feel utterly useless, as though all I am amounts to nothing and as though I could never accomplish anything worthwhile.

Today, as I walked under the cloud-free blue sky, feeling the cold wind trying to sneak into the collar of my hoodie and various layers, I realized that that can't be true.

I am a student at Case Western Reserve University, not some random catch-all college that produces ho-hum alumni, but an educational institute that at times competes with MIT, the third-ranked engineering college in the world (could be wrong on the scope) and often with Carnegie Mellon, another highly-respected university. I wouldn't have been accepted into this incredibly geeky community if I hadn't any talent for it, and I wouldn't hold A's in my classes if that talent had lost its potency.

I associate as an equal with a group of very intelligent, very talented (and some very hard-working, persistent) achievers, and though I am not the best, I don't need to be.
And that's just for engineering.

I am a writer who has attended an international workshop that accepted eighteen young writers that year--with one of my worst stories. I was close to attending a similarly-sized writing group at a Governor's School of Pennsylvania, likely thwarted only by my chosen genre and open will to write any story that appeals to me, whether with my own characters or someone else's. My writing may not be perfect or comparable to Timothy Zahn's or Jim Butcher's, and definitely not to Tolkien's or Rowling's, but it is better--in style, plot, and characterization, to many published books. I have a very real chance of being published so soon as I finish something original in the genre I love--science fiction novels--rather than the one with better publishing statistics and at which I'm worse--science fiction short stories. (Alas, the harm in adoring character-oriented fiction and developing as I write: It takes me 5,000 words to show the progression of a character a short story writer would describe in a sentence. I could do it, I suppose, but only when accompanied by the groaning and tortured screaming of my inner muse.)

These things aren't what life is about, I know, so they should not matter so strongly to me. At least I don't need to be best. I just want to be good enough to have a future in them. To some small extend, they're like the assurance that God will shape me into the person he made me to be. It's not a measure of where I am now, but it is the confidence of what I will become that pushes me to do the work required to get there.