I suck at writing. I really do. When I was a kid in elementary school, I decided that I wanted to be a writer. For several years I was convinced that I could be a writer when I grew up. I wrote stories in school and even won a prize in the English fair a couple of times. In middle school, my English teacher even picked me to be the one to write an article in the local paper about school uniforms and my opinion against them. However, I continually labored under the illusion that I was good and that I could really and truly write a book when I grew up.
High school began to change my mind about that. I served as co-editor of my school’s literary magazine during my eleventh grade year. Being behind the scenes of the magazine, meant that I also coordinated the English fair entries for my school. As a result, I entered a ton of my own writing, simply because I didn’t have to have it pre-selected by a teacher. I could fill out the entry form myself, throw it out there and see what happened. Well, what happened was that I won 4 awards that year. Two of which were the 1st and 2nd place of the Personal Narrative category. So you might say that I should have a high opinion of my writing skill. However, during my creative writing class, which served as the pre-requisite for the literary magazine, I was given the assignment of writing a fiction story. My fiction story ended up being a ten-page expose of how I lost my virginity to the school’s widely popular burn-out. I was suffering from teen angst and couldn’t see past my own life to write about anything fictional. My flaky teacher at the time returned my public diary to me in a brown envelope with a note on the outside. She had written that I should hang on to the story and then open it in ten years because it would make a great beginning to a novel. Oddly enough, that was almost ten years ago, and here I am writing, not a novel, but a blog. However, it is not a fictional account of anything.
I also discovered that year that I could indeed write good fiction, in fact I won 1st place in the fiction category of the English fair. However, the story that won was written for my grandpa who had asked me to write a story for him about miniature people living in his Christmas village. So I can’t even write a fiction story on my own with my own ideas. My last and final attempt to do so was in a college creative writing class in which I tried to re-count the story of my life through fictional characters. After the disaster that story turned out to be, I realized, I suck at this. Fiction writing will never be my thing.
Instead, I’m going to say screw it. I’m not going to even try to write something fictional. I want to write about my own life. It’s what I’m good at. Besides, isn’t it a well known fact that you have to write what you know in order to write well? My life is all that I know. It’s all that I will ever know. My purpose for writing this blog is to not only make true the compromise I made to myself when I decided not to pursue a writing career. I decided that I was going to be a teacher. That evolved into my first choice. So to make amends with the fact that I was going to disappoint my grandpa and not become a writer, I decided I was going to be a teacher with a writing career on the side. The thing is though, I don’t care if this blog leads into a career or not. I've certainly not heard of many blogs that do. I just want to write this blog and tell my story. I’m not in college anymore; I don’t get opportunities very often, if at all, to write papers, so this is my final paper.
This is my life, or at least significant moments, memories, and thoughts of a person who can have many labels: teacher, Catholic, mentally ill, animal lover, future wife and mother, estranged daughter. As of July 11th of this year, I added another label, 27 year old.
