My parents read my blog - that's what I get for posting the link on facebook, I suppose. Luckily I had not yet posted any embarrassing information. Come to think of it, I don't think I have any embarrassing information. I don't drink. I've never been romantically involved with anyone. They more or less already know my secrets. It's just a little embarrassing. Awkward. Something I was not expecting and did not expect to come up during a skype conversation the other day.
Though all my mom had to say was, "Actually, we went to Iowa State University, not University of Iowa." To which I did not reply. "It's Iowa. No one cares."
No offense to anyone who may be reading this if you are from Iowa, have friends in Iowa, eventually move to Iowa, or have some sort of fondness for the cornfield I mean state.
So for my sanity's sake I am just going to pretend my parents do not know that I am writing and carry on as normal.
Several readers have made it known to me that they enjoy reading my blog, and that they consider it well written. First of all, thank you, it really does mean a lot to me. It's actually a little mind-blowing to hear/read that.
I've struggled with writing since I was about six, about the same time I was solidifying my reputation as a bookworm, and paving the way for the many ironies of my life. Of course I could understand those wonderful things called books, and read those magical things called words, but generate my own? Take those words that have already been laid down in perfect order by holy beings called authors and scramble them with my own clumsy efforts? Use them to express my own weak thoughts and tiny life experiences? Impossible. Every sentence was a drag, and I kept to the bare minimum, ashamed of my puny efforts to control words.
It did not help that in the midst of this, I had a slightly traumatizing event. First grade. We had been herded to the gymnasium to watch some concert/performance thing, probably the middle school or high school choir. Then we were herded back to the classroom and told to write a journal about it. I stuck with my three sentence minimum, ending with "It was cinduv (kind of - this was, believe it or not, before I devolped my mad spelling skills) boring."
A reasonable statement, yes? In fact I had enjoyed the concert or whatever it was, but due to the disorganization of the management, we had waited for the show to begin longer than a six-year-old's patience finds acceptable - that was the part I had meant was boring, though I could not think how to express it. I showed it to the teacher to get it stamped off.
She did not like it. In fact, a part of my memory that I do not entirely trust but do not entirely doubt says that she tore the page from my journal. "That is not how you talk about other people!" she told me sharply. The part of the memory I am sure of is that she was loud enough to cause the entire class to look at me and witness my humiliation. And for a shy child who does not have many friends and does not like being in the spotlight, can you imagine a worse punishment?
Now that I am older (it seems there are advantages to growing up after all) I find the teacher's response to have been entirely unreasonable. Since when was "boring" a forbidden word? Since when was an opinion of disapproval socially unacceptable? And what the HELL gave her the right to frickin' embarrass me in front of everyone and give me a literary handicap that still affects me today at nineteen?
For years I could not show anyone anything I had written. The safest course, in fact, was to not write anything at all. It's not like I intended to be a writer or anything, as so many smiling adults asked me when they heard I liked to read. But there was still curricular writing to deal with. Make a sentence using each of the spelling words - I couldn't even do that. Well, I could, but it was very, very uncomfortable, especially when the teacher sat down and read them right in front of me. Don't even think about writing a story. Or book reports. I sucked at book reports. Summarize the book: It's about a kid who finds out he's a hero and has to save the world. Now tell why you liked the book: ...I don't know, I just did? Because it was fun to read and a heck of a lot more interesting than my own life?
That fell a bit short of the 1-2 page requirement.
Oh, and in sixth grade, I found out at the end of the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education, for those who don't know or forgot) Program that we were supposed to have written an "essay" about how DARE changed our life, which I had not realized was mandatory. Nor had I realized that we were supposed to read it out loud in front of the whole frakking class. So I and the underachievers were sent to the computer lab to type something up - I think that was probably my first experience BS-ing a paper - and called back into the classroom to read our pieces. And I couldn't do it. A kind girl offered to do it for me, and I let her, sitting for the next two minutes in abject misery, each word a slap in the face from my incompetence. This part might have more to do with stage fright than write-fright, actually, but the two were closely tied.
It did get better, oddly enough, in middle school. However, as this post has run rather long (and is not what I was intending to write about at all), I will save the story of how I triumphantly overcame my difficulties (And you can too! Isn't it inspiring???) for the next post.
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