At the age of nine, I was nominated the next Rosie O’Donnell for my fourth-grade class superlatives. In the sixth grade, I made a gossip magazine on Microsoft Word about my classmates. When I got into middle school, I tested out the school paper and continued it every semester until I graduated high school. I can remember sitting at the lunch table with my best friend and planning the magazine we’d someday own.

I Don’t Want Fame; I Just Want to Write

It is all I have wanted since before I can remember: move out to Los Angeles, interview celebrities on the red carpet, write for Rolling Stone magazine, have my own talk show. This has always been the dream I’ve carried around with me. That’s it. There is no plan B.

Rolling Stone magazine

And now I’m 20-years-old, a little over a year away from graduation, and scared shitless.

All of my friends are after jobs that are just within their grasp. They want to be an accountant, a nurse, or a manager of a retail store. I want a job in a career field that pays next to nothing. I want to leave everything I know and move hundreds of miles away to a three hundred square foot apartment. I want to achieve something that could be impossible and send me back to South Carolina, broke, with my tail between my legs in shame.

I tell people my dream and I can practically see them wanting to reach out to pat my head, humoring me like I’m a three-year-old telling them I want to be an astronaut or a cowgirl. They don’t think that I—someone who has always depended on her parents and has never been away from home—will be able to do this. You know what, maybe they are right. I could end up at a desk job, working from 9 to 5 with a husband and couple of kids.  It wouldn’t be the worst life, but it’s this thought that keeps me up at night, terrified that there won’t be anything more for me.

Like I said, there is no plan B. In a year and a half, I’m taking whatever money is in my pocket and moving into that small studio apartment without knowing a single soul within hundreds of miles. Hopefully in a few years you’ll see me with a microphone on the red carpet or my byline in Rolling Stone. If not, at least I tried. That’s more than most could say.