Can I really call myself "TeenAuthor" anymore?

I feel like I'm growing up. Not in the physical sense, but the metaphysical, in maturity as well as body. After completing my final Christian Ministry and Leadership course, which I did not want to do and was forced to do for the 1 Unit towards my HSC, I feel like I have completed one of the rites of passage, that await me as the end of my Year Group's schooling career approaches. As a Pathways student, I will be left behind by my friends to complete my HSC, but despite the immaturity of the Year 11 group who will take their place, and which I will become part of in a sense, I cannot help, after a long, philosophical (and non-drugs influenced too!) conversation with one of my closest friends, that it could well be that I am becoming a man.

I am not yet 18, the official mark of manhood for Australians of Y Chromosome ownership, but yet, other cultures have boys that become men at much younger ages, such as in the Jewish religion. Perhaps, it has come the time when I have to finally confront the end of my childhood. But as much as I miss my childhood, I feel the urge to join into my age group's celebration of Adult Life.

I contemplated the nature of my joyous and mournful writing career. Am I more than just a teenage author, now that my childhood is ending and my identity as a Man has come? Will my talent transcend fleeting youth?

I say, it will, as I live to write, and I write to live. My work is part of my being, the way I reach out to people.

I write, to be loved. Not for fame, fortune, and material gain. Simply, to be loved. It is Human to want Love, and it is also Human to create. Will I be loved by my readers? Only my development as a writer will be able to tell me that. I used to think I could do without a single edit, now, I feel it must happen, or my works will be like Peter Pan, never developing past adolescence, in eternal childishness forevermore, and I would be ruined as an artist and creator.

But I will not give up. I had even begun my first sign of growing in wisdom. I was not discouraged by criticism of my work by a friend, and I will continue the book I discussed with them, taking on board the advice I was given, advice which breathed new life into a book struggling to learn to walk, after crawling so long as an infant idea.

I am a young man, and young men grow. I must develop, lest I grow stubborn in my old ways, facing reality as much as I write my literary fantasies that make people think.

And I will grow, oh yes. And I will conquer.

Sincerely, Jacob Martin. Former Teen, Still Author.