Letter to the Class

I’ve realized it even more, lately. It’s not that it only recently began, but I’ve only recently began to acknowledge it.

I hide behind my writing.

I noticed it first in a fiction writing class I took at my high school – the first creative writing course I’ve ever taken. In that class, I found solace and release. I poured emotion into the stories that I wrote – emotion that I never showed otherwise, and created characters and situations with what you might call reckless abandon. I had absolute power to create and to manipulate. And every time my story came up in the rotation for in-class discussion, I fed off of other students’ reactions, watched their faces when they hit paragraph five, listened with utmost urgency at their critiques. Perhaps you wonder why I say that I hide, when I’ve openly put my writing out there for my peers to assess. The thing is: it wasn’t open. In fact, this course had a certain aspect that I found very appealing at the time. Everything was conducted in anonymity.

I remember my first journal. I called it a journal then, as I do now, but there was a period in between when I played with the idea of calling it a diary. I was ten, and it was the first journal that came my way. My grandma sent it to me all the way from China, thinking I would like it because it was green, my favorite color, and because it had English text running in the shape of a heart on the front cover. I read the English text and it turned out not to be English at all. The unintelligible words were simply blocks of letters arranged in a way that, I presume, the Chinese must have thought resembled English. The first thing I did was print my name neatly and perfectly on the inside cover. Then I began to write…in pencil, the thought of which now makes me cringe.

I’ve kept a journal for nine years now. And I’ve expressed myself largely through written, but unspoken, words.

It’s hard to be real. But in writing, no one’s watching. If no one reads, no one can judge.

On the other hand, if no one reads, no one will ever know. And by sharing, we can learn so much. I’ve always felt uncomfortably exposed when I volunteer my writing for others to read. I saw it as a sort of violation…into something so personal, so raw, so unready. But I am beginning to understand that exposure is necessary sometimes. We are taught to push limits, stretch boundaries, but we also need to let our own be poked and prodded, uncomfortable as it may be.

That said, I’m holding onto the edge of my seat in a mixture of nervous excitement, fear, and curiosity for what the semester may bring. Hopefully, somewhere along the way, I’ll push myself far enough to finally let go.

Wishing all of you all the best,
Simone