“Why I Write” Essay
As a child, I always enjoyed having stories read to me, but I rarely ever desired to read them myself. The process of piecing together random letters arranged on a page was far from easy for me, so I simply avoided it. Avoiding reading inevitably led me to avoid writing as well. I never saw this as a weakness of mine as more pressure was put on me to learn a whole other language than to learn to write the one I already spoke fluently.
I only realized how behind I was in English when I moved back to the US. It became common for me to flip the placement of vowels within words and structure sentences the way they would have been spoken in french. This led my third and fourth grade years to be filled with nonstop reading comprehension passages and writing practice sheets over small things that all of my classmates had already mastered. That is exactly when I decided that I hate English.
To this day, I still hate reading and writing for the exact same reason I did when I was ten: I am forced to do it. I can’t remember the last time I picked up a book or sat down to write in a journal just because I could. With the exception of one essay I wrote sophomore year, I have never enjoyed writing assignments. Whether it be writing an essay or a story I somehow always end up giving up because I am never able to make it “perfect”. The one time I did enjoy writing an essay for school it was completely open ended. I had the ability to write my essay about something completely different than my friends, leaving me no room to compare myself to them.
Over the years, I have come to see that my frustration with writing has stemmed from being a perfectionist. I feel that nothing I do is truly done until I’m sure that it could be chosen as the best out of a pile of many others. And although I do wish I could slowly learn to enjoy reading and writing again, every word I stumble upon that I can’t easily read or spell reminds me how much more frustration than enjoyment the subject has made me feel, and that is not something that I like to inflict upon myself. So, the ultimate answer to the question of why I write is not because I want to, not because I have to, but because it shows me that I am so much more capable than I give myself credit for.
