Second Chances?

Dear Writing…

So, my own love story with writing doesn’t actually begin with writing (I know. Scandalous! 😱)  As with many authors, my story actually begins with its younger, more popular brother: reading. Looking back, I always had a strange affinity for the written word. According to my mother, as a toddler, I would squat in a corner flipping through picture books and magazine articles and newspapers staring at what was nothing more to my little mind as random scribbles. Upon discovering how to read those scribbles, I treated them as if they were bread and butter. During church, I would curl up under the pew to read through the liturgy which meant that the first story I remember isn’t The Ugly Duckling but Jesus’s crucifixion (Sadly not as fun). During recess in elementary school, I would sneak into the library to plow through Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia. During family outings, a la Princess Belle, I always had a worn-out book in hand causing many accidental crashes into people, various furniture, and doors. It got so bad my parents would actually ground me from reading at various times throughout my childhood.

But, being a dumb kid, I don’t think I actually understood my ability to write my own stories until the fifth grade. In my little worldview, “authors” like J.K. Rowling or Charles Dickens (whom I absolutely adore) were a species unto their own, something akin to the unicorn. In my defense, I will say that throughout my life, I had never truly written before. From kindergarten to fourth grade, it was all reports about animals or three-sentence descriptions of what we did for the weekend! Or why I love my family! Not exactly Pulitzer Prize winning stuff.

And writing has always been a sensitive issue for me. As a Filipino first-generation immigrant at four years old, having parents who weren’t so good at English really affected how I looked at it. From an early age, I remember being the one to proofread emails and letters and paperwork for my parents, rewriting sentences over and over again until they were right. I remember the grammar books we had all over the house and the dictionaries we would pore over to find which word to use. Because bad grammar, using “is” instead of “are” or “on the office” instead of “in the office” or my personal favorite replying “for a while” (a direct translation of what “see you soon” is for Filipinos) meant that you were a FOB aka Fresh off the Boat. A “dumb” immigrant who can’t write properly.

And as a little kid, I felt that. The smirk the principal made when he looked over my mom’s poorly worded letter or the way my classmates snickered when I awkwardly read my little report in front of the class. Even in real life, the impatience that waiters and cashiers and neighbors had when we would struggle to communicate what we needed. Or the way they laughed when they thought we couldn’t hear them. The look that made my mom rant about how they can judge us when they can’t even speak Filipino.

Becoming a strong writer was my way of saying F*** you to all those people, of proving the world wrong. It was my way of making the tables equal and showing that you couldn’t judge me by the way I wrote. Because if a Filipino immigrant could be the best writer with the best grammar and the best vocabulary in the class, then guess who would be laughing then?

But it was in the fifth grade that writing finally evolved for me from a tool to exploit into something I love. The prompt? “In the footsteps of Native American myths and legends, write your own legend explaining a weather phenomenon.” Those seventeen words made me realize I could be an author too! My award-winning idea? A cloud god whose son died and his seven daughters, one for each color of the rainbow, who paint him a picture (the rainbow) to make him feel better each time he cried. I poured my heart and soul into that story complete with stereotypical characters I copied straight from Disney movies, unnecessarily long descriptions of every character’s appearance, and incredibly awkward dialogue that still makes me cringe when I think about it.

A little excerpt for those interested: Enter Cloud Heaven. The sisters (named after the rainbow cause why not) find out their brother, Claudius, (I was always a punny gal) is dead. 
Indigo gasped, “Claudius is dead?” “Yes. He is” Orange said. “What?” asked Red. “He fell on the ground,” said Yellow. “What will we do now that he is dead,” asked Green. They all cried.

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But, despite it literally being a poor man’s Disney film, writing this story made me realize how much I loved real writing. Having my tiny scraps of an idea formulate into something solid, playing around with sentences until they were perfect, the pride of creating something I was proud of. And for a while, being an author was my biggest dream, the thing I wanted to be when I grew up. Going through middle school and high school, I realized that I didn’t just love it. I was actually good at it! But with this realization came another realization.

While I never stopped loving writing, the boredom of academic essays and book reports and constantly analyzing/summarizing other people’s work rather than making something that was my own led to my passion becoming an indifference. On top of that, everything we did in school with writing was for a grade. All that mattered was MLA format, word counts, grammar, and the outline. And I hated the outline with its fill-in-the-blank sentences and its one “right” way of doing things. It made us nothing more than stupid puppets reciting whatever the teacher wanted us to say for a percentage.

Writing was always something I found exciting and inventive.  The reason why I loved it was because it offered realities, characters, viewpoints that the limited world as we see it never could. There are so many different ways you can write from newspaper articles to fantastical to scientific to mysterious to romantic. And they all had a purpose, a message, a reason for existing beyond a stupid letter. I didn’t want to spend my time writing useless papers without one, so I churned out the crap the teacher wanted and moved on with my life. And writing became a means to an end again, a tool to get to that shiny diploma after four years.

So here I am in this English 101 class. As of now, I’m still skeptical if I can ever be the crazy passionate author again. Eleven years of public school does that to you. But since I was a fifth grader with piggy tails, I’ve never been as happy writing as I am now. This class has given me that purpose again. So, who knows?  After all, according to this incredibly cheesy quote I found:

 

So here’s to hoping that this is that kinda love story. (Looking back, I realize how weird and sad this analogy might sound. Don’t worry, my life isn’t this depressing… I hope 😝)

(It’s a joke. I’m not judging you Twilight fans smh)