My earliest memories are of my mother reading to me. It goes without saying that I don’t remember the first few years of that nightly bedtime ritual on account of being, you know, a baby. I didn’t form those first fuzzy memories until I was about 2 years old, of her steady voice sounding out Dr. Suess and her slippered feet tucked under floral duvets.
She read to me every single night. We started with glossy picture books, moved to nonfiction hardcovers about dinosaurs and Amelia Earhart, and graduated to Babysitters Club and Cam Jansen, all patiently narrated by my immigrant mother as she slowly sifted through the unfamiliar English words, passing them on to me after she had learned them herself. I have no doubt that her reading to me every night, often to the point of hoarseness, gave me a voracious appetite for books. Later, I became a writer.
I use the word “writer” loosely because I never thought of myself as such — I just liked to write. I started journaling in middle school, and also kept a book idea diary in which I planned all the mystery novels, the best-selling fantasy trilogies, the somber bildungsromans I would someday publish as an adult. On the shared family computer in my parents’ room, my father created a desktop folder for me where I would, each day after school, clamber into the squeaky leather chair and methodically tap at the dusty keyboard for hours and write story after story to be saved on the desktop, to be saved for the future.
Public educators also inflated my writer’s ego. My teachers would write glowing comments in the margins of my writing assignments. I got used to getting A's on all my essays, short stories, end-of-the-year autobiographies — you name it. For the longest time, I thought I was a good writer. It defined me, and I created a kind of secret identity in that.
That was until high school, in advanced English classes where I was assigned to peer edit the essays of other students. Some of these papers were expectedly bad. I felt guilty whenever I took pleasure in slashing rambling paragraphs with a red pen, scratching out convoluted theses in bloody ink. Some of the papers were good. Surprisingly good. Startlingly good. My competitiveness and insecurity set in at once.
There was one girl whose papers were unfailingly good. I began to dread reading them because I knew they were always better than mine. Whenever I did, I would come across lines that stopped me in my tracks. As a reader, a sentence strung together a certain way, or a choice of words that came off as eloquent yet deceivingly simple choked me up. As a writer, I did not know whether the pressure was from awe or envy.
After a while, I stopped writing. The older I got the more talent I saw in others, the more I read the more I realized my mediocrity. The desktop folder, transferred to my laptop freshman year, and bursting with the snippets and passages from a million ideas I had, are now quotes from a book I’ll never write. I thought I had overestimated my abilities, and out of self-preservation, I stopped. Only I also underestimated how much my writing was my crutch, my catharsis.
Every bad experience I had in college I absent-mindedly channeled into a rush of words in my Notes app. I dumped anger and frustration and elation into an online journal, I scribbled it on scraps of paper in the middle of lectures, I unwillingly continued to write even though, in my head, I had resigned to stop.
It was only a few months ago that I realized I needed to start again. Willingly, this time. How could I possibly attempt to get better if I did not practice, if I did not strengthen that metaphorical muscle? So I forced myself to do something I never imagined I would: I signed up to write for Odyssey, to have an audience, to get feedback. I couldn’t just start writing again on my own. I needed pressure, a fire under my ass, a way to be accountable. I needed to publish.
Returning to something I had abandoned out of fear is not easy for me. I am a perfectionist, so naturally, it is hard to even to begin a piece, let along continue and finish it, knowing during the process that my work is unsatisfactory. Also, publishing is scary. I have never written anything for anyone other than myself and various English teachers.
There’s a kind of vulnerability in putting thoughts down on paper. A kind of weakness in translating yourself into words to be read or skimmed or scoffed at. I don’t like the idea of being picked up and leafed through, only to be placed back on the shelf to collect dust because my first line doesn’t shake you. But I want to get better. I want to push myself into my un-comfort zone, to not be afraid of the disappointment. I want to create again, and even though I might have an audience this time, I'm doing this for me.
So, a word of advice. If you have a craft, or a hobby, or an art you used to love, don’t neglect it. Feed that dormant hunger, and remember why you loved it in the first place. The places your craft will take you are unknown right now, but imagine the happiness it could bring you. Imagine the depths it might pull you out of. Imagine where you could be six months, one year, five years down the line if you picked up your bow, your brush, your sneakers, and just began.
As I begin writing again, I find solace in the title of one of my mother's favorite books to read to me, as the night-light glow reflected off her thin-frame glasses and her accented voice sketched words into silence all those years ago: Oh, the places you'll go!
