An Essay, by Me

Just a few moments ago, I submitted my first assignment for a class in over a decade. It's Coursera, so this class has no bearing on my life, but it was still intimidating. The course is Rhetorical Writing II, and the assignment was a "getting to know you" sort of deal. This is what I wrote:

But, I’m Not a Writer

by Amanda Stark

I spoke with my dad on the phone recently. He said, “So, I read your blog. It’s good. You should write.” Interesting. The idea of writing for something other than my personal journal had been percolating somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain for the last few years, but I hadn’t expended any effort on acting on it.

You see, I am not a writer; I’m a reader—at least that’s what I believed for most of my life. When the idea of writing for an audience first occurred to me, I ignored it. I’m not a writer. I’m a reader. Yet, writing has been something I have been “good at” for a long time. In elementary school, I remember winning awards for short stories I wrote and attending a young writers’ conference in a nearby city. I don’t remember what I wrote about (knowing me, it probably included horses), or what we did at the conference. But my elementary teachers for at least two years thought I was a good enough writer to represent my school at this conference.

A few years (and two school districts) later, I was in eleventh grade and I somehow found myself in an advanced composition course. I’m sure there was some sort of prerequisite writing course, but I hadn’t taken it. Was I recommended for the course? I don’t recall. What I do remember was a note my teacher wrote on my literary analysis of Huck Finn. She said I was a good writer. But—I thought—I’m not a writer. I’m a reader.

I started university with every intention of becoming an elementary school teacher. One month into my freshman year at Brigham Young University—after the first two experiments in my “Physical Science for El Ed majors” convinced me that I even if I wanted to be an elementary teacher, I could not handle four years of working with BYU  El Ed majors—I sat looking at the course offerings for secondary education. I knew I wanted to teach, but what? I pondered on the classes I’d liked the best in high school and wandered off to the appropriate office to change my major to History Teaching. I liked history. History is reading, right? And, I’m a reader.

But, history isn’t just reading. History is also writing. (But, I’m not … )

 I struggled through my “writing for history” courses. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to write. It was more a mental block. It was one of those this-is-going-to-be-hard-so-I-don’t-know-where-to-start things. I procrastinated. I whined. I played solitaire. I watched “Friends.” Eventually, I started writing. My final grade on my senior paper was 297 out of 300—I had written “than” instead of “then,” or maybe “then” instead of “than.” But, I’m … ?

During my first couple of years as a teacher, the only thing I really wrote was cover letters. My first job got cut after a year by a Republican governor “getting tough on the budget.” My second job was a year-long ESL gig in Seoul. My third teaching job was as a middle school social studies and language arts teacher at a small school in the southwestern-most corner of South Korea. I remember accepting the job, thinking, “Of course I can teach English…I’m a reader…”

I started blogging. It was really a way to share my ex-pat life with friends and family back home without writing endless emails. At first my blog was mostly pictures, but as social networks made photo sharing easier, I started spending more time blogging my thoughts. Blogging was the cowardly route for me. Yes, a blog is public, but who would read it unless I told them about it? I could write “publicly,” but no one had to know. Even so, I dithered about with every post. I hoped that someone would read it, but feared it at the same time. What if I was wrong? What if I wrote badly? I envisioned nameless, faceless netizens criticizing my every syllable, disparaging my conclusions, and even maybe condemning me in comments.

But, I wrote. Occasionally, I risked the emotional onslaught I feared most by posting my blog posts on Twitter or Facebook. As I ventured further and further out onto this precarious perch of public writing, I had an epiphany: without even realizing it, I had turned to writing to process life, good or bad. As my friends and I drove through the technicolor canyons of Southern Utah at sunrise on a college road trip, I grabbed a pen and paper to write a poem.  When I was aggravated with a boss, I punched out my frustrations on my keyboard, drafting a scathing letter which I, of course, never sent. When I found out that my dog—my faithful companion, my beautiful baby bear who greeted me every day with a sloppy smile and slept by my bedside when I was anxious, but whom I had had to leave behind with loving friends in Texas when I returned to Korea—had died, I tossed and turned for hours until I finally got out of bed, turned on my computer, and wrote until the words and tears ran dry.

My epiphany was that while I may not be a novelist (though, I hope that is still up for debate), I am a writer. Writing for me is no longer simply an academic exercise; it is a coping mechanism. It is how I sort out the hopes, fears, frustrations, exhilarations that are a part of life. I AM a reader, but I am also a writer.