This morning as I was absentmindedly scrolling though Facebook and sipping on my new favorite tea in an effort to pull myself out of the Monday morning haze, I was greeted with a new article from Levo League. Despite acknowledging the now bordering on cliche title about how someone figured out their twenties, I couldn’t help but think “Twenty-something? That’s me, an article about me, I wonder if this applies to me! Figuring out, I’m figuring things out, maybe this will help me figure things out!” in between more cynical judgments of my own sucker-ism that “These words are an over-used ploy for clicks and ‘figured out’ seems a little presumptuous don’t you think”…I clicked anyways and told cynical Sarah to go back to sleep. Or so I thought.

Because after clicking I found misplaced commas. Misspelled words. Misused tenses. Missing apostrophes completely changing meaning from possessive to plural. More misplaced commas.

It is hardly the standard of quality I’ve come to expect from Levo League, and even though I think the content was pretty good, the fact that it came with one glaring grammar fault after another completely distracted me from that value and shattered all assumed credibility. So I kept judging. I judged her age. I judged her alma mater.

I continued clicking through to her blog, reading a recent post that included a well-written anecdote about her public humiliation from a misspelling due to lifetime struggles with dyslexia…

Oh.

Whoops. I don’t think I’m the only one so quick to judge others, and I’m certainly not free of my own misplaced commas or worse, misspellings (ha…too soon?). It made me think about why I had such a strong reaction of snowballed judging. She seems like a perfectly nice, driven girl with whom, upon further blog investigation, I have an awful lot of shared interests.

And then this thought happened. “Is it because she’s published? Because you’ve wanted to submit writings for almost 2 years and haven’t tried even once? Because…you’re…jealous?”

Well there’s an uncomfortable thought.

So it’s time. I’ve been gathering online publications that accept submissions for so long, it’s time to actually send something to some of them. I’m not sure what this something will be or when, but I’m putting this goal out there so I have to do it. So there it is. On the screen. Being real.

For the record, my morning wake-up efforts didn’t work. I’m practically sleep-walking in heels, which is not an easy feat for someone just a little lacking in coordination. My high school choir teacher always said, as someone tripped up a riser or a fell off the top one for the umpteenth time, “Someday you’ll be graceful.” …Someday is not today, folks.