i don’t write a lot but

i guess i’ve been writing a lot lately — written december, 2015

When I read things I’ve written in the past I am always amazed. It’s always a bit hard to believe how well I was able to write in a time before the present. I almost feel like I must have been a better writer at that point in my life. Are my writing skills constantly regressing? It’s a really weird feeling. Do other people feel the same way when they read their old essays or school assignments or blog posts or whatever?

I remember looking through an old assignment from elementary school when I was in high school and genuinely being impressed by how interesting my project was. It was the final project for a book we’d been reading together in my 6th-grade class. At that point in my life, in elementary school, I wasn’t interested in writing or “creativity”. I don’t even remember how I came up with my ideas. What could my creative process have been as an 11-year-old with extremely limited interests and experiences? It was also my first year free from ESL classes so I had somewhat limited language skills to work with.

Maybe I’m more impressed by how interesting my ideas were than how well I was able to express things in words? Does that make more sense?

I’ve never really felt like a good writer. This is another thing I feel weird about. I’ve thought about this a lot. How can you tell you’re a good writer? I’m almost never completely satisfied with my writing. It’s never just right. There’s always something wrong with it that I can’t quite fix or don’t have the time to fix or don’t want to fix.

Then again, I don’t write much. I can’t say I’ve ever enjoyed writing. I can say the closest thing I have to enjoying writing is enjoying writing on my blog. I do do that a lot, but there’s 0 consistency in the amount or the level of writing I do on my blog. I’ve always been more of a thinking or drawing person.

I think a lot of people probably had to do the most writing in their lives during school years. For now this is probably true for me. I haven’t been out of school for very long. But I think in just a couple of more years, this will no longer be true for me because I avoided as much writing as possible throughout my 18 years of school.

In college, I purposely chose classes that involved the least amount of writing assignments. I also chose a field of study that involved the least amount of writing. In high school, by the end of 10th grade, I had stopped doing all English assignments that I didn’t have to do during class. Of course, there were assignments that were impossible to avoid… like the in-class assignments, exam essays, or term papers that I had to write if I didn’t want to fail my class. The unavoidable nature of these assignments made them even less attractive to me. For some reason, though, I’ve always done really well on these writing assignments.

One day in high school, we were doing independent work in English class. And by “we” I mean my classmates. (I don’t remember what I was doing but I can’t imagine I was doing what I was supposed to do.) It was really quiet in the classroom so everyone looked up when we heard our teacher laugh out loud from her desk in the back of the classroom. She was marking our most recent in-class essay assignment and she quickly commented that she was currently reading my essay.

After this comment, a lot of questions instantly materialized (metaphorically) in my head. These were questions with a sense of urgency, I felt, because of how quickly they were popping in, so I tried to answer them to myself as quickly as possible.

The first question was: is it a good thing that my essay made her laugh? I had to think about this a little bit. Was she laughing because my essay was ridiculously bad? Was she laughing because I was funny? (General consensus, among my friends at the time, was that I had a weak sense of humor. I was okay with this. How far does a sense humor really get you in life anyway? Whatever.) The answer I settled on was: yes, this is a good thing. I wasn’t sure why but I felt that it was a good thing that my essay made her laugh. Of course, another similar question was: why did she laugh during my essay? I didn’t really focus on this question because it was impossible for me to know unless I asked her and I was too focused on answering my questions to really speak. I think my classmates would have thought about this question more before they asked themselves if it was a good thing that our teacher was laughing at my essay.

But I think everyone did come to the conclusion that the teacher’s feelings toward my essay were positive. Which was the answer for my next question, did all my classmates realize what I just realized. They probably did, right? I felt special. I also felt weird because I didn’t particularly like my essay. I didn’t think I wrote it very well. Up to this point, no one has told me I was anything above average in my writing ability.

So my next question was… what exactly are the implications of this event? Am I good at writing now? Am I a better writer than my fellow classmates whose essays didn’t get a laugh from our teacher? Will everyone now acknowledge me as “their classmate who is good at writing”? Am I actually funny contrary to popular belief? I couldn’t answer these questions. It was all too hard to answer. It did make writing seem a little bit less intimidating of an activity for me.

After this happened, I continued to receive positive feedback from my English teachers on my writing. The more it happened, the more I asked myself if I was a good writer. Like I said before, by the end of 10th grade, I stopped doing English homework. Now in 10th grade, this was still a bad thing for me to do. My final mark for the class was not great. But, in grade 11 and grade 12, I did this with almost no consequence.

In grade 11, I had a new English teacher, and I think I did 1 assignment in the whole year. The teacher gave me the 2nd highest mark in the whole class. If someone asked my why, I’d have to say, it was probably because my essays were great? I don’t know? The same thing happened in grade 12, new teacher, no assignments, 2nd highest mark. Were my essays so good that my English teachers felt compelled to disregard my inability to apply myself for all other assignments? I did participate a lot in class… maybe that was part of it too? I should have just asked them…

Here’s another side story. I’ve always told my parents about parent-teacher nights in high school, where parents can make appointments with teachers to talk about their children’s progress in school. This is actually risky for me because of my infamous aversion to doing homework. I feel lucky to say that parent-teacher nights have never really created any problems for me. (There was one time when there was a bit of a problem but I solved it really easily and no parties pursued the matter any further than I would’ve liked.)

My mom told me once that a teacher actually told her she should not have showed up at all because he had no problems with me and that this was a waste of time for her. She told me another story, from the same day, that I have a harder time believing. Apparently, my Social Studies teacher told her that she felt that I was a “natural writer”. To this day, I still wonder what she could have meant by “natural writer”. I also wonder if my mom didn’t mishear “natural writer” from something completely different. My mom’s interpretation was that my teacher meant that I am naturally talented at writing. I understand why she would want to think this way. My mom has always liked writing and people would tell me what a great writer she was. In university, she was part of a poetry collective, which is cool and all. But, me? A natural writer? What?

I have a really hard time writing. I struggle with form. I struggle with style. I struggle with content, words, structure, everything. My writing never looks right to me. And like I mentioned in a previous entry, I can’t do fiction. I just can’t. I’ve tried and failed many times and my brain won’t even let me finish the thought of trying fiction again. Just typing the last part of that last sentence gave me a headache. But for some reason, my writing is okay for other people. Even after high school, I still got good marks on the 1 or 2 essays I had to write each year.

I took an English class one year because I couldn’t get into any other classes I was interested in. On our first essay assignment, I got an A. I thought, okay, that’s better than I expected. We got our assignment back after class and I sat down to look through it. Then I overheard other students discussing their marks. Someone says he got a B+. Then someone says that’s supposed to be a really good mark. Others agreed and said their marks were lower. I thought, they’re kidding, right? Why did I get more than a really good mark? Was my essay that good? I almost wanted to ask them to show me their essays, so I could compare theirs to mine. What was so great about my writing? I think about this a lot. When I ask my mom she would just say that I am naturally talented at writing, just like her. That’s not helpful, mom.

At this point, I have digressed as I do to a point so far beyond what I was writing about in the beginning that I don’t actually remember what it was.(But okay, I just checked.) So my initial point was that I am forever amazed by pieces of writing from my past. But I don’t think I’m a good writer. So do I feel like I’m a good writer when I look at my old pieces of writing? Nope. I can still see everything wrong with them. But I guess I feel like I’m a better writer than I remember being.