WP4: In my own language

I’ve never taken any real ownership over language. It exists, I use it; it’s a one-way relationship that suits me just fine.

Maybe suited would be the more honest way of approaching this. It suited me just fine.

This semester taught me lots of things about myself, and one was that my relationship with writing was a relationship with no conflict whatsoever. (This is strange to admit; usually relationships don’t strive for conflict to succeed.) I wrote, and I do, write comfortably. Not to my full potential, but comfortably enough where I can guarantee that I’ll pass a class or write something that addresses the prompt exactly and nothing more.

And so, this semester was going to be like any other, and I’d survive a writing class just on sheer comfortability. But it wasn’t what I expected at all, and before I knew it, I was starting to have conflicts with my writing. Our first projects were supposed to be personal, an exploration of our own voice, one that never emerged simply because I didn’t have any major problems with my writing. I never thought writing about myself was appropriate, and I thought it was slightly egotistical and boring. No one but me cares about my life, so why bore someone else with it?

But my conflicts continued; it was suddenly glaringly apparent that my writing itself was boring. It seemed comfortable. It didn’t want to go anywhere, it was fine addressing the prompt and getting a mediocre point across. It didn’t want to say anything.

But I had things to say. (And if I haven’t been very transparent up to this point, I’m definitely a person with very strong opinions, even if I don’t talk about them out loud.) I wanted to say something astute; I wanted to argue, I wanted to celebrate, I wanted to share things I loved and ideas I thought were interesting to think about. I discovered conflict, and now my writing had to compete with itself to be better and to be something.

I learned in my WP1 writing that passion was good, even if it didn’t present itself in a conventional form or it was messy and had too much to say. At least it said something.

WP2 took me a while to understand in its own right — now I wasn’t comfortable with my writing, and I learned that I had things to say and that I had a way to say them. So, my WP2 turned into a project of: how exactly could I say things? And if there wasn’t a subject specific prompt, what did I even have to say?

The archival format was fun to write with and lined up with the way I write too: in oddly-shaped chunks that all fit together in some sort of twisted puzzle, that resulted in a clunky, but awfully fun project to create. I explored the things I really held dear to my heart; the things that were important to me and that really mattered in my eyes.

I learned in this stage that writing about yourself isn’t so bad, and that it’s okay to have fun with your writing and create silly names and be just a bit vulnerable. It builds character.

WP3 was my very small labor of love. I learned a lot in writing that piece, but god, was it dense. This time I got a little too close to the sun and didn’t make it. I was inspired by my WP2, I had discovered that I wasn’t just some apathetic grade-earner of a writer and that writing could be something more to me if I had something to say.

This time I had way too much to say. From giving a brief and messy history of the Enlightenment period, to explaining theories from multiple Feminist authors, to applying it all to films that belonged to a new categorization that related back to those theory pieces I had spoken about before, I had my plate full and I wasn’t sure that I’d make it. Luckily, it somehow all came together and it was at least coherent. But I learned a lot in that process of working through what I wanted to say and deciding how much of it should really be said.

This time through my writing I learned to pick my battles. A newly discovered voice is exciting, but don’t wear it out or let it get out of control. Writing doesn’t have to be stiff or boring, but make sure it’s not trying to tackle too much.

And now we’re here. I’m here. As much as I didn’t expect it, writing has become so important me through my journey (and it truly was one at that) this semester in exploring where my voice really was.

The prompt asked us to write about the role of writing in teaching us ________ about us. And through all this, I’ve realized that the role that writing played in my semester was teaching me about me.

I learned to locate myself in my writing, I’ve learned what I’ve wanted to say. I’ve learned what’s important to me and what I can’t stop writing about even if I tried. I learned what my voice in my head really looks like when it’s all written down and what it looks like to have my voice completely embedded into my work. To have my writing be my own.

I could write before, but now I can speak. I’m uncomfortable now, writing a piece that I can’t interject my voice into, but now I have new conflicts to tackle to solve those issues. It’s some kind of Pandora’s Box situation; now that I’ve opened up the experience of being able to make a home in my work, it can’t go back to what it was. And like I mentioned in my last post on Medium, I’m deeply grateful and humbled by the experience to learn something worthwhile and something that won’t go away.

Through this all, I’ve taken ownership of my own language. Writing has taught me this much about me.