Seth C.
Seth C.
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

I remember when I first started writing and realized my love of putting words together meant I could tell stories I loved.
Fourth grade. P.S. 54. The truth of how the world works hadn’t yet been revealed to me yet. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be that naive again.
I forget the name of the teacher from that Language Arts class, but let me paint you a picture of one of the many women throughout my life who helped shape the monster I’ve become.
She was a heavy-set woman in her 50s who clearly failed somewhere in life. She had a penchant for cruelty where she would scream, humiliate, and ridicule kids who misspelled words and wrote stories she deemed horribly written. Her drawn-on eyebrows was always the first thing I noticed — two black boomerang-shaped arches atop a face with an expression that was somewhere between contempt and regret.
The way she scored our written assignments were based on a scale of 5, and I noticed everything I wrote was always either a 4/5 or 5/5. It got to a point where while others struggled to write something creative, I created narratives based on the books I was reading at the time. Each story had a definitive beginning, middle and end.
Fast forward a couple of years. During college, I was publishing stories on a Livejournal account back when it was the must have thing to have. I saw it as a medium for budding writers and people who just wanted to overshare personal accounts of mischief and debauchery amongst their friends. I remember writing a story that was allegorical as a way to express hurt, anger, resentment and bitterness towards a former girlfriend who read it and missed picking up on the subtlety. As I’m writing this, I’m slowly cringing and laughing at myself for taking the time to write something so personal yet allusive that ultimately led nowhere towards discovering its true meaning.

I guess you could say I still love telling stories. It’s been a while since I’ve written anything meaningful or creative. If this account ever picks up in its consistency, I have a small core group of colleagues to thank for the inspiration.