Artist v. Journalist

Being a journalist entails writing about other people. My problem is that inherently, I am an artist, and have an intense need to express myself and tell my story. These two sides of myself are constantly at war with each other, and trying to reconcile this and find a balance is proving to be difficult. I find myself asking if I even want to be a journalist. I know I want to be a writer, but do I want to spend my life telling everyone elses story, or do I want to tell my own? It's not like I think my story is the best or the most interesting, it's just the one that I am most compelled to tell. I think that this "revelation" I have come to today has caused me to decide between a Masters degree in fiction or non-fiction. I always thought that since I write about things that happened to me, that I write non-fiction. Which is true. But. Going on a (slight) tangent here:

Growing up, I always wrote (fiction) stories. They served as an outlet for the things that I was feeling and going through. My characters did things that I dreamt about doing, they dealt with things that I was dealing with. While I was going through an eating disorder, so was a character in one of my stories. It was like I was telling my story through these characters. I could give closure to an issue in a story that in my own life wasn't over. It could be a model for what I wanted to ultimately happen.

Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, some of my favorite writers turn their life experiences into stories that are based on real events but are ultimately fiction. This is what I want to do. I want to write stories. I want to create the scenes, not recreate them from someone elses memory. I want to decide how it will all turn out.

So my next step now is to write a 25 page fiction story for my admissions manuscript for graduate school. And I think that I have an idea.