That's the difference between a real journal and one that's invented for a novel. A novel journal has to be manipulated so someone reading it can have enough comprehension, which means the person writing it would've had to have a sense of a someday-audience.

That's the difference between a real journal and one that's invented for a novel. A novel journal has to be manipulated so someone reading it can have enough comprehension, which means the person writing it would've had to have a sense of a someday-audience.

In college, unable to be "special" - or in demand - as a girl, I made myself useful, even essential, in my microcosm - as a writer and photographer for the band, particularly for the band director. My "specialness" was to produce something of value, not to look like something (with that different kind of "value"), so I was still fundamentally invisible, but had a significant purpose.

Nobody sits alone accompanied only by a stewing ambition that won't see fruit for years. Ambition is something you turn into publicity before there's anything to publicize.

Everyone I know, men and women alike, would love to see the world changed so that boys and girls, men and women are valued equally for what we contribute, despite the differences in how our brains and bodies work.

What I was being told in my 20s in the close-quartered, male-ego-infused work space, was that I had to stop reacting with my emotions to sexual desire towards me. The change, in other words, had to be made in me.

Culture and society determined sexual desirability as what makes us important so long that it's part of our sensibility from birth.Little girls know. From around 2 or 3, the pretty ones already know how and why they get attention. And how quickly they learn to play it. Use it. And how quickly the rest of us figure out we don't have it.