Writing to Learn: Understanding Myself & the World through My Writing
My journey as a writer has been lifelong, and though graduation signifies the completion of my interdisciplinary writing minor and the end of my formal writing education (for now), my journey is far from over. My relationship with writing is simply evolving, just as my relationship with my undergraduate university has evolved now that I'm an employee, the Presidential Fellow in the Office of Personal & Career Development, and no longer a student.
My education, my internship experiences, my extracurricular involvements, and my new job all center around writing and communication. However, when I've completed so many writing assignments of all kinds, over the last four years of college, over the previous four years of high school, and even over the years before that in grade school, it can be easy to lose sense of myself as a writer. What have I accomplished, how have I grown, and how far have I come? The only way to find out is to track my course as a writer.
Although I can’t recall much of the writing I did in elementary school, some fuzzy memories shine through the cracks of writing riddles and short stories. The first time I can actually remember writing “for fun,” however, was in sixth grade, when I wrote about Chaliapas, a myth of an Alaskan wolf. My teacher asked us to read a story aloud as a group in class but stopped us just short of the ending. The story told of an Alaskan girl who had a pet wolf, and our teacher asked us to imagine all the possibilities of what could happen in the pages we didn’t get to see and to craft one for ourselves. I created a new character, Chaliapas, a spirit who was trapped within the wolf and who was fiercely protective of the girl. My teacher wrote a note to me praising my work and encouraging me to write more, so I did. First, I kept working on that story — I just kept writing and imagining, without any direction in mind, and suddenly the wolf was actually an evil spirit, and the protection of the girl had been a ruse to allow him to get close to their family and enact his revenge on their neighbors. I didn’t know the story would go that way, but it evolved as I wrote, my words seeming to have a mind of their own. Then, suddenly, without finishing the project, I was thrown by my imagination into the depths of another story, of a romance in a ghost town, and I spent hours in front of my computer, filling digital pages with my words.
I continued to write, both in class and outside of it, joining the debate team and writing my first “research papers” in the form of speeches. In the next years, my English teachers saw my potential and created opportunities that I did not fully appreciate until many years later. One started every class with a short prompt and a free write, decided to have our class produce a middle school newspaper together and made me Editor-in-Chief, and asked to submit one of my poems for publication in a youth anthology. When I transitioned to high school, however, my writing assignments became more academic and less creative. Although my grades and state standards test scores and AP test scores and SAT test scores all told me I excelled in writing, and I felt like writing for my class assignments came easily, I no longer felt like a writer. It’s hard to pinpoint what happened exactly, and when, but my writing process began to look very different than when I squirmed in front of the computer with excitement and lost track of the hours as my imagination flowed the story of Chaliapas straight onto the page as fast as I could type. I felt like true writing had to be guided by a deep internal itch, a desperate need, a burning passion, and I didn’t feel it. I only wrote when in response to an external question, or when prompted by a teacher or supervisor. My personality is enthusiastic and energetic and extra and silly and hard to tame, but somehow it felt like my writing process didn't embody that -- writing was the only time I sat down, got serious, and truly concentrated. Writing didn’t feel like a joyous pouring out of myself. So I decided that I wrote, sometimes fairly well, but I wasn’t a writer.
I’d come to understand creative expression a very specific way throughout high school. Who I was as a person who writes but isn’t a writer was informed by what I’d felt was an incredible epiphany I’d had about being a person who does art but isn’t an artist. I’ve always done art. And I’m proud of much of my work — I’d even venture to say that some is good, talented. Yet I’ve always struggled to think of myself as an artist. My “artist” classmates in my high school art class were compulsive. Their fingers itched to document their observations, feelings, stories through art. Artists doodled and sketched in every class, every second of free time, every time they sat for too long. Artists did something more impassioned and deliberate and necessary than every lay-doodler or smartphone photographer. Artists were not like me: I took three times longer on every art project than my friends because even though I felt skilled, none of the work flowed out of me, and I slowed down and concentrated rather than feverishly working. I had to force myself to remember that it was time to do art. I stressed and agonized over the way my work looked without relaxing enough to feel it. There was no internal drive to do any of it if it was not assigned to me. I was calculated, methodical, doing and redoing and perfecting—approaching right-brained work with my left brain. I did enjoy art, and I was sometimes proud of my work, but I was rarely satisfied with any piece for long. After taking years of art classes inside and outside of school, I knew I could further and further refine my skills to hone a craft, and I knew I was creative and innovative. But as an artist, I felt like a pretender. I did art, and people often liked my art. But I wasn’t an artist.
After this breakthrough, when I felt like I was finally able to put into words my complex relationship with art, I came to see my writing the same way. I wasn’t someone who carried a notebook. I didn’t journal or write in diary entries, I didn’t put my feelings to paper in stanza or prose, and I never entered writing contests or read my poetry at open mics. I felt like I never wrote for fun or simply because I felt like some internal drive told me I had to, or should, or wanted to. I’ve written lots and lots and lots, for classes, for jobs, for my minor, for my majors, for my activities and clubs, on social media, in long texts to friends. But it felt like I didn’t need to write for fun — my purpose and drive never seemed to come entirely from within — and I always liked the finished product itself more than the process of writing it. At some point in my life that I could not identify, I’d apparently “outgrown” writing for fun. I never even finished those stories about Chaliapas or the ghost town I’d started as a kid. I felt caught in a strange paradox: I was skilled at writing, but the way I wrote made me not only different than writers but also somehow lesser than them.
Sure enough, before entering college, I was advised through the Directed Self Placement process that I could bypass the first-year writing requirement, so I did. I felt confident in the essay I wrote, and I didn’t want to be retaught fundamentals I found intuitive, so I gladly moved on. I felt sure I didn’t need an introductory college writing class, and I wasn’t sure I’d fit in anyway. Writers looked differently than I did, maybe, or talked differently — poetic people that could accurately articulate the most breathtaking experiences and phenomena into words. Maybe I wrote good things, but maybe they wrote great things, or if I wrote great things, as I could confidently say I did, maybe they wrote things that were just truly excellent, profound, and beautiful. So I decided that when I went to college, I wouldn’t write. I wouldn’t take a writing class, or participate in writing-based activities, because that had taken up so much of my time during my middle school and high school years, and I felt that by allowing myself to focus on something I was comfortably skilled at, I’d blocked myself from discovering my true passion that would excite and energize and challenge me in ways I hadn’t even yet begun to imagine.
Then, during my very first weekend as a student on Wake Forest University’s campus, I got the email that changed everything. The news editor of the Old Gold & Black (OGB), the official student newspaper, had gotten my email address confused with that of a previous writer, and a personal assignment for an article popped straight into my inbox. In high school, I may not have identified as a writer, but I was extremely over-involved, did struggle to say no to helping someone out, and did write for the student newspaper. So of course, during my first weekend as a college undergraduate, I found myself sending a totally predictable email to take on an assignment I never would’ve predicted I’d get. I let them know that I wasn’t who they meant to email, but if they needed someone, I’d be more than happy to take on the piece if they explained how their publication worked.
And just like that, my college writing career began, immediately and unexpectedly. I got to go to the OGB office and meet the news editors, who I was pretty sure were the coolest seniors ever, during my very first weekend on campus, before I’d even started classes. They told me they’d get me an interview with Student Health Director Dr. Cecil Price, who was notoriously busy and hard to sit down with. When I interviewed him and wrote and submitted my article, I felt so important and so confident that my first story ultimately became one of the most informative experiences I had during my first semester. As I continued to become more and more deeply involved in and passionate about the Old Gold & Black as a publication and an organization, I started to get the sense that maybe that email hadn’t been an accident. I’m not a spiritual or superstitious person, but I started to get the sense that I’d been pulled back on track. I was proud of my writing for a reason—maybe I needed to stop running from something I was good at and find a way to allow myself to enjoy it instead.
Through my network at the OGB, I found a position as a public relations and communications intern for Wake Forest Law, and I decided that if I was going to keep looking for jobs that involved writing, I had to demonstrate to those hiring that I had the educational background they desired. My English professor during my first year told me about the interdisciplinary writing minor, and I began exploring it by taking its gateway course, Writing 212, The Art of the Essay. It was then that I first began to truly understand the idea of “writing to learn.” Writing has always allowed me to enrich my understanding of ideas and theories because I must put them into my own words, synthesize them and apply them to readings, and even go one step further by evaluating them or crafting a critical argument on them. But I didn’t fully appreciate that it was the writing process that facilitated that deeper understanding until writing began to teach me about myself.
It was sophomore year of high school that my mother’s alcoholism began to permeate my life, but I told no one, and it was not until sophomore year of college, when I took Writing 212, that I was able to truly begin processing that and healing. This course was the first time since before high school when I was given a formal assignment that challenged me to write creatively and personally, and I did. After reading and learning about memoir essays, we were tasked with writing one, and stories I didn’t even know I needed to tell, wanted to tell, could tell poured out of me.
I wrote about alcohol, my mother, my tattoo, my first year of college, and being queer, and somehow, they all came together in a narrative that allowed me to see who I was and why. My first year of college was extremely difficult for me, both academically and socially, and I’d struggled with feeling like I didn’t know myself. I was over-involved, taking crazy number of hours of classes while playing a sport, holding a job, and writing for the OGB, and I was chronically sleep-deprived and often ill. I found that my identity as an overinvolved, overachieving student in high school didn’t come so naturally to me in college, and I’d yet to find close friends or even feel as though I saw myself reflected in this new place so far from home. When I tried to engage with the social scene, going to parties and joining a sorority, I was miserable, because as much as I wanted to drink or be around drinking, I never could for very long without thinking about what I saw when I was living at home and what I feared becoming. I also started my first weeks of college in a relationship with a woman, but as that relationship and others with both men and women came and went, I’d still yet to identify as anything but straight, and I knew I was neglecting a part of myself. I was totally floundering, and while I’m in a much better place today due to many factors — I found my work-life balance, a major I love, a place in the LGBTQ center, and a wonderful supportive partner and group of friends (and I got professional support from counselors) — I know that the reason I began to recognize all of these things and became able to talk about them was because of the writing I did for Writing 212.
My memoir essay grew longer and longer, through long nights spent crying in front of my laptop, and my professor decided that in lieu of the next essay assignment, if I could double the memoir’s length and dedicated time to workshopping and revising, I could submit the single essay for both assignments. Over the course of that semester, I found that I had a skill I’d never recognized before: being easily and candidly vulnerable and authentic in my work. Through writing, I was able to not only tell my story, but to find it in the first place — I was writing to learn about myself. I still didn’t feel like a writer, but for the first time, I understood not just what my writing could offer the world, but what my writing could also offer to myself. I decided to continue with the interdisciplinary writing minor and began to take courses across many departments that all centered the writing process in their syllabi.
Two years later, when I was applying for the Wake Forest Fellows Program, the foremost way I defined myself in my application materials and in my interview was as a passionate and skilled writer. I shared my love for the writing I did for both my sociology major and my writing minor, and I explained that I’d also developed writing skills through my internships; however, the experience that I talked about most passionately, and the one that surely got me the job, was my eight-month internship for Winston Starts, a local startup incubator, where I collaborated with a small team of supervisors and other interns to accomplish a broad spectrum of special tasks and projects. When I first started the internship, I came in without any business knowledge, surprised by how little of someone of the presentations I understood — Seed funding? Exit strategy? Venture capital? — but I found that my confidence and abilities as a writer allowed me to hit the ground running as a respected part of the team and to integrate into the discourse community without prior knowledge of the business lexicon. I wrote through social media, I penned and edited blog posts and website copy, I developed marketing materials and flyers, I wrote formal one-pagers and requests for proposals, I established our brand and voice, and I wrote emails and contributed to office culture and team-building events. One of my supervisors, Winston Starts President Steve Lineberger, often called me into his office for special projects that he thought could benefit from my writing, telling me that I was fantastic at what I did and that it was so great to have “a writer” on staff. It was well-established at this point that I had communication and writing skills and could effectively write for a variety of discourse communities and genres — from essays for classes to news stories for the student newspaper to blog posts about letting company employees become stakeholders. But due to the rigid and narrow definition of “writer” I’d crafted for myself, I was not immediately able to internalize Steve’s perception of my identity.
But then I had another breakthrough. So what if I don’t get a “runner’s high” from writing? And maybe my writing process looks different and less impassioned and I don’t “get in the zone” the way we’re taught that self-motivated artists, writers, and creatives called to their work do. It doesn’t matter that the way I write is unique. My role at Winston Starts was “writer” — this was my place within their team, this is who I am as an asset to others. By writing throughout college and being affirmed in my abilities by my professors, supervisors, and peers, I’ve finally begun to see myself as a “writer” again.
So, who am I as a writer? I am a storyteller, I am a sociologist, I am an extrovert and an empath. I am a woman, a sister, a daughter, a significant other, a best friend, a colleague. I am a composer and consumer of a high volume of small pieces — a social-media and text driven Gen Z-er. I am silly, I am effervescent, I am creative and colorful and queer. I’m more confident than ever in what I’ve learned and my capacity to grow. Finally, I am a writer, and I’ll sort out the in what way and the how and the why along the way. I write like I’m talking to the page. I write to tell the stories of others, to convey my passions, to describe campus and job news, to denounce an injustice, to respond to the words of others when I feel that they are wrong, to communicate with those I know well and those I don’t across the world. I write to learn, and I’m still learning to write.
Within the pages of this portfolio, you'll find the assignments that challenged me most, the work I'm most proud of, and the writing my professors and supervisors liked best. Thank you for allowing me to share my work with you.