I hated writing. I hated writing more than the doctor, or the dentist, or my younger sister when she left her dirty laundry lying around.
I remember sitting in second grade, writing an essay on why uniforms in schools were dumb. My paragraphs didn’t have enough sentences to fulfill the 3 sentence requirement, I couldn’t come up with more than one reason to write about (I just didn’t want to wear a uniform), and this whole conclusion thing where you have to restate what you said in your whole essay but not was really throwing me for a loop.
I remember writing the same essay every single year through Elementary school. I always asked my teachers, not out of cheek but real desperation, why it mattered? Why do I even need to write? Why can’t you just take us down to the district office and I’ll tell them why uniforms are not a good idea?
Don’t get me wrong, I love school. I work hard. I always do my homework on time, and I do it willingly, without any persuasion from my mother. I’m also an insatiable reader. When kids in my second grade class were tackling the short 20 page barbie chapter books, I had already read the harry potter series (well, as many as were out at that time) at least twice. I remember staying up late every night devouring a new book, driving my sister insane because I refused to turn off the light, and when my dad came in to rather forcefully make me fall asleep, I read in the dark, holding the pages close to my eyes trying to make out the words in the dark.
Teachers knew I was smart, but writing remained my biggest weakness. I couldn’t seem to fit my thoughts into the cookie-cutter mold that was a “persuasive essay”. In the eighth grade I was placed in an advanced english/history class that met for two hours a day, because I did scored near perfect on all of the context reading tests they gave me. Our teacher had us writing essays up and down and left and right to the point where I should have been able to whip out a satisfactory essay in 30 minutes. But I couldn’t. I consistently got the lowest scores in the class and while my best friends were doing heel clicks down the hall with their perfect scores, my teacher was telling me I had no hope and I should quit the class.
My ninth grade teacher didn’t believe in writing essays, so we rarely were assigned one, which was a nice break from the rabid essay assigning I had endured the year before. I lucked out my sophomore year as well, getting a teacher let us spend our class time discussing novels and their meanings, and beginning to unravel what makes good writing good. Junior year I did, unfortunately, return to the essay writing world, but this time I had tools to help me dissect good writing to help me apply it to my own attempts. Plus, I knew I could ace the multiple choice portion of the AP exam and I would be fine.
I remember walking into the first day of my AP literature class senior year and being a little bit wary. The teacher was newer, and the first thing she did was assign us an essay on the summer reading. Having been stuck at boy scout camp all summer, I had not taken the time to analyze the summer reading. The trauma from eighth grade writing kept bubbling up that first day. But class got better from there. Our first unit was poetry, and our study of poetry in my 12th grade AP literature class is what taught me that I was, and could be, a writer.
I was allowed to forget the pre-programmed essay format everyone seemed to have. Poetry became whatever I wanted it to be. There were forms, and there were guidelines, but the words were mine, and for the first time the structure added meaning, instead of being simply a formality. Poetry invited me to experiment. None of the poems were very good, but they were truly mine.
I still feel anxiety the moment a professor assigns an essay. My stomach turns into some kind of bubbling geyser of emotions that I can’t repress. But I know now that the best essays are the ones that follow their own form and don’t pretend to be perfect.
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