It has been brought to my attention that I am not invincible as I have previously believed. Though I feel all scars and marks that label a person as growing could pass by me, "realism" would like to slap my face and say, "you're a good person and all, Ellie, but you aren't better than anybody else." Or maybe it's just a little slap that says, "See this? This is a sign of progression; progression means things are happening, Ellie. What is happening with YOU?"

Yesterday, I found a gray hair. My first gray hair. Frail and thin, lying surreptitiously one inch from the top of my forehead, lying conspicuously amongst my brownish-reddish hairs, waving quietly as if to say, "They haven't noticed me yet. Shhh�don't say anything!"

Tears came to my eyes. Is this ridiculous? Is it crazy that I should feel like crying when I find my first gray hair? I think so. Deep down inside, I think that vanity should not make a person cry. But to defend myself, it wasn't for vanity. It was for � progress.

I wanted to have a novel written by the time I was 22. I was going to be one of those people--the ones who didn't care if they were published or not, because it wasn't a copyright page that made you an author--it was the hard work, the toil, the effort. I'm 25; 26 in four months, and I have put in no toil, no effort� no hard work.

Is this gray hair to remind me that time is passing and I am changing and perhaps before the second one grows in I should take my life a little more seriously? I don't want to be here forever. I don't want to be a caseworker, in a cubicle, answering the phone and taking notes and feeling frustrated and making deadlines and remembering all the phrases I need to include in my reports. This isn't what Ellie wants and it certainly isn't who Ellie is. It's a good job; it's a worthy job. I understand and appreciate that my job makes a difference and I actually affect people. But it isn't what's planned for me. I'm not saying that there is a set plan, put forward by some higher thing, but I am saying that my plan--my own "thing"--is not this.

I'm a writer. I may not have filled as many pages as I did three years ago, and I may not have anything published between two hard covers or in the glossy pages of a magazine, but it's in me. The suffering I know has to go on when you want to write is the only thing I'm afraid of. I don't want to live or feel what Ernest Hemingway or Virginia Woolf felt, but I do want to project the feelings I have that are akin to them in pages that can be appreciated, and if not appreciated, at least expelled from me.

Yesterday, I found my first gray hair.

Now I have to do something to show I've earned it.

At least, that's how I'm going to look at it.