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From Me to You

Why I Write

“Describe your family for me please .”

Crayons scribbled out colorful letters that careened wildly about the page. Short fingers gripped the molded wax and tried to put to paper the images of family that floated in a 5 year old mind. A house with red doors, two cats, mom and dad. Do we capitalize Mom and Dad?

“Write a poem on what you see, feel around you.”

In the playground, sitting on a stump on the fringes, we looked around at all the activity and inactivity. We were 12 year old minds trying to sound serious, to be taken seriously. We worked with rhyming and used a thesaurus to put down words too long for our reach.

“Compare these two excerpts and tell me what the style, tone, and message of the author is.”

We looked at Helen, the ancient woman whose face launched a thousand ships. But what did she mean to the Greeks and what did she mean to the Trojans? A trophy worth fighting for or a curse that they had to fight for? 16 year olds sat in a classroom and tried to explain imagery, symbolism, and sentence structure in 60 min. Eyes glanced over hastily written essays, heads hoped everything possible had been crammed in, and morose hands turned them over to our teachers.

“I’m most concerned with how you lay out your thesis.”

Freshman year of college and we were back to the structure. We worked at the best thesis possible, making sure it reflected our essays and said everything that needed to be said concisely. We analyzed and dug for quotes, and our books were littered with post-it notes that stuck out crookedly and helplessly. The Odyssey and Iliad were strewn amid our research, mingling with laptops that tried to remember too many documents.

It takes courage to admit that I don’t actually know where I’m going. It’s easier to just reach for the next short term goal that is so tangible, so reachable, and not to worry about where it’s all leading. As I hear myself telling others they should join us in our goal-less quest, and as I’m asked to write about my memories, I feel myself falling into a vicious cycle of do, reflect, regret. How many moments did I let fly by and how many more will reach the same fate? But this trickle in considering my past has set off a waterfall of awareness, and it’s washing away the grime of being stuck in the details.

Before, I wrote as a means to an end to constantly push further and to complete the next item on my checklist. I used pretty words, sound structures, and crammed everything I needed to say into a time constraint limited by the sound of a bell so that I could move on to the next block of time.

Then, someone asked me to listen to myself and to think about myself. Without realizing, I had run through my life and followed all the goals, done all the things that everyone thought I should do. I was successful because people told me I was successful.

It takes a lot more to be honest with myself than it does to be honest with other people. Maybe I write so I don’t have to say it out loud, but at least I take a baby step towards listening to myself. And it all started with a recording, quite literally, listening to myself. I had this assignment built into my day and it was required for me to move on to the next step. But, all of a sudden, this requirement needed me to look back in order to move forward.

I used to scratch at the surface with a toothpick and call it a day. I ran through my days like typing across a screen, and the purpose of my essays was to just get by and move along.

But now, it’s time to tunnel with some tool from the past, something that goes deep down and gets to the root. It’s about discovering that new metal in myself, where it came from, and use it to find what I want to do and what I want in life. It’s about discovering that spring of truth, filtering out the mud, and seeing what’s really important to me.

Sometimes, my writing cuts in a zig zag, and I don’t really know where I’m going, but at least I’m trying. At least, now, my writing is a way to stop the flow of time, to stop the pages from turning in my planner, and to document events that I’ll be glad to remember 10 years down the line. Because if I don’t, 10 years will pass and I still won’t know why I do things or what matters to me.

I write to understand my past so that I can plot my future. I don’t blindly run into the future anymore, hoping that the stepping-stones miraculously lead to personal success. I build my own success by discovering my true interests.

It’s time to stop running through life so that before I’m 90 I can remember how I got there. Now, it’s about taking time for myself, discovering what I’m really about, and how I fit in with those stories from wax to those stories on Microsoft Word.

“Take a recording.”

What?

I looked at him and said, “A recording?”

Then I looked at my planner and tried to find what, in my calendar, blocked off with barely 30 min in between, I could possibly record for myself. Find something of importance to you in your life, something that you can record, and record it. Then translate it into a piece of writing.

I turned on my phone and took it with me to a rush event. I taped our process, met someone who criticized us, listened to everything again back home with the yellow lamp casting a sheen on my blank screen, and began to think.

Before, I had run through my schedule, hit every goal, completed every assignment, and never looked back. The past was irrelevant.

I had too much to do to prepare for the future.

But, for the first time, to hit the next mark, I needed to turn around and walk backwards, listen backwards. As I poked around behind me, listening to myself, thinking about myself, I found I was a little lost, and it was a little scary.

Is this who I want to be? What do I want to do, and am I doing it the right way?

“Write a memoir about something in your life.”

Not cataloguing, not observing as a bystander, but looking back at my life and telling a story.

Words flowed out and it was all jumbled together. Grades merged, classes blurred, and my time in between flew past my eyes onto the paper in front of me, and before I knew it, I was 20 years old and half way through college.

Stop! Can I capture my past with the same affinity I have for planning the future?

My dad always said, “You need time to just think every so often, you can’t always be in a hurry.” At the time, multiple times, I shrugged it off. I was supposed to be busy; this is what productivity was. But as I listened to my own voice, octaves off on the recording, and as I sat down and thought, I was lost in my reflections.

It takes a giant’s power to claw myself out of the details of life to see the big picture, and I’m dizzy with the new perspective from 5000 miles above .

Our first assignment in Writing 220 asked each of us why we wrote. This was the first time I've ever really thought about it, and it was a harder question to answer than I thought. I looked back on all the different types of writing I had done throughout my school career, and noticed something interesting. Previously, I used writing as merely a middle step to another level. I loved it, but I only used it to cross one more bridge on my path to success. The assignments were always, just that, assignments.

Sophomore year, for the first time, I was asked to write from a recording of my life and then to write a memoir of my life. This time, the assignment was different, and I was forced to look backwards to go forwards.

I now write to capture moments in life that are so fleeting we don't notice until they're gone. I write to look back at myself, and to give myself time to breath in a schedule without breaks, to figure out where I want to go. I write to look internally at the past and to enjoy the present, so that I can plan for the future without regrets.