I have decided to start blogging again. When the thought first crossed my mind, I labored over it much too long. I struggled to narrow my focus: Would this be a work-related blog, a devotional type blog, a motivational blog, or some combination of the three? Work can be (for me, a true workaholic) an all-consuming aspect of life. Blogging about work alone would have been the easier choice, but I decided to blog about the one thing that helps me to find balance in spite of my own personal tendency to be task-oriented to a fault. That one thing is writing. Here I will record my musings on writing, teaching writing, and becoming who I am through writing. Hence the title: Musings on Writing, Teaching, and Becoming. Since today is only a few days from NCTE's National Day of Writing, this first post will be about why I write.
For as long as I can remember, writing has either chased me, or I have chased it. As a child, I wrote in an effort to understand. I needed to get to know me. Where did I fit in this world, my school, our home, my family? I wrote about myself a lot, capturing my emotions on the page. Making them each a keepsake for later self-reflection, an opportunity to rethink and grow through rethinking. As Thomas Newkirk notes in The School Essay Manifesto, "the most basic source of knowledge, fluctuating and unstable as it might be, is rigorous self-study" (45). As a child I wrote, and today I write to reveal myself to myself. Writing is self-revealing, a means of reaching self-actualization.
I wrote my way through the most trying times in my life. I contemplated our strained family dynamics. I wrote about the absent father and fading brothers. Describing water as "the great destroyer and preserver of all" in contrast to "blood," my frustration flooded the page in images and words--sometimes prose, sometimes poetry, always working to hide the truth in similes and metaphors, symbols and motifs. You wonder what the water referenced, don't you? Twenty-seven years later, it is still hidden in metaphor. My teachers praised me but did not know they praised my pain. A student with "perfect grades," I was perceived as healthy and strong. I was in actuality hurting and weak and sometimes suicidal. But I wrote to heal myself, self-medicating on the printed word. I still write to heal myself. Writing is, after all, prescriptive medicine, each sentence a single dose.
As I got older, I grew stronger, exercising my muscles with a pen in hand. Nothing could destroy me as long as I had words, and words could not only save me but propel me to the next level. I wrote my way into a full tuition scholarship at Xavier University--a scholarship I did not initially receive. I wrote my way out of an $11,000 hospital bill. I wrote my way into a larger disaster loan than initially offered post-Hurricane Katrina though I had no actual income to qualify for it at the time. But for the words spilling from my typewriter keys... I wrote to reveal myself and convinced the scholarship committee that they had made a mistake, convinced the hospital to write off the bill, convinced the government to expedite and increase my loan. Writing was and always is a game changer.
So why do I write? I write to study myself, to find healing in the midst of pain, and to reveal truth in an effort to motivate change one word at a time.
