Why I write despite knowing that writing isn’t my strong suit
It’s okay to love doing something you’re not talented at.

As a little kid, I was a total bookworm. I went through chapter books so fast in kindergarten and first grade. Perhaps this stemmed from the fact that I loved being transported to another world where I could forget about everything else going on in my life. I was super shy and had a lot of separation anxiety when I first started elementary school. I would cry getting on the bus all the time. Very embarrassing. When I got to school, my teachers allowed me to spend the first few minutes of class reading in the back room to calm down. I loved that time away from everyone else, just me and the story. As I moved through elementary school, I lost the anxiety (and rediscovered a different, much more severe side of it in high school, but that’s a different story) but kept my love of reading. This led me to admire the writers. I wanted to be just like them someday. After all, that would be such a cool job: to be paid for making up silly stories all the time and making people happy by transporting them to another world.
So I wrote my own stories. Mostly for assignments, but I would often continue them after I had handed them in, just for fun. My fifth-grade language arts teacher told my parents I was one of the best and most gifted writers he had ever taught. In sixth grade, my best friend and I wrote a 60-page short story together. Desperate for validation, we lied about our ages and submitted it to an adult publishing agency. Terrible idea. We didn’t think we’d get accepted, but we did. We got emails about contracts and such. So we told the agency we changed our minds and did not want to work with them. It ended up being fine since the agency shut down after being involved in a lawsuit for committing several felonies and was shut down. Yikes.
After that debacle, we didn’t write together much more. I still proofread her stories and she reads my articles, but we had very different styles of writing and were always pulling the story in different directions.
I learned from writing that story that I have no talent for making up my own plot. I just can’t do it. So I turned to journalism. I don’t have to make up a story because it’s all there for me. All of the facts, all of the opinions in my own head, and all I have to do is organize them on the page. Which is harder than it sounds, but I still prefer it to creative writing. That’s how I found this website, actually. I was writing an essay on a topic of choice for English, and I chose how dress codes perpetuate rape culture. I plan to clean up that story sometime soon and publish it here. I really liked writing it so I turned to my English teacher to try and find somewhere to publish my writing.
But it’s a frustrating business. I have a very small following and I don’t get many claps. I have to prove myself first. It’s a challenge I have yet to overcome. I am a perfectionist, which is why I turn out a story maybe every 6 weeks. I have at least 10 stories with 800+ words in my drafts, but I can’t bring myself to publish them until I can’t make any more meaningful edits. This one, when it finally sees the light of day, is no different. Some of the sentences just sound wrong and I don’t know how to fix them. I know my writing sounds inexperienced and immature at times and that my grammar isn’t always on point. I’m working on it.
I often wonder if I’m just not cut out to be a writer. Writing papers for school is something I find difficult and painstaking. I only want to write about things that I care about. No matter how hard I try, sometimes I just can’t come up with a thesis about a character trait of a fictional character from a book written 200 years ago. I have a very specific talent (if you could even call it that), and that’s for writing about real-world issues.
The reason I write is that I love making a difference. Maybe it’s not by transporting people to another world, as elementary school me would have hoped. But writing about the issues of this world and spreading awareness and changing people’s mindsets is something I love to do. So forgive me if I have some awkwardly phrased sentences at times. I just want to make a difference in the world, one undiscovered article at a time.
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That’s all for this one. Check out my last story!
