How I learned to write "good" pt.2

I don’t even remember middle school, so I’m skipping straight to high school. High school was total crap. Teenagers are mean, petty, materialistic, and confused. I did my best to make it through, and just barely survived with only a minimal amount of emotional scarring. I wasn’t completely innocent, though, and had exhibited a bit of my own teenage angst. I wasn’t smoking in the boy’s room and doing shots of Jaeger before Algebra class, but I wasn’t exactly the most cooperative child, either. This was most apparent during my junior and senior years in lovely downtown Mount Clements.

I’ll leave out the fine details, but suffice to say, I wasn’t the most innocent young man in my class. Somehow, and I have no idea how, I still ended being up the class valedictorian. I had a friend working as an aide in the main office, and he overheard the assistant principle actually say, “he has to be the most belligerent valedictorian we’ve had at MCHS in years.” When you’re 16 or 17 and as dense as I was, you take great pride in such criticisms.

My belligerence extended very readily into each of my English and writing classes. My creative writing teacher disliked me so much, that she would purposefully give me bad grades on my well written papers, and good grades on my poorly written papers. She must have gotten some enjoyment out of messing with me.

When I would have to write a paper, I would sit quietly at the desk in my bedroom for hours, staring at the wall, not writing. If I had a paper due, it would haunt me until 11pm the night before, when I would finally give in and write the damn thing. Writing, aside from perhaps talking to girls, was the most frightening experience for me in high school. I was a decent writer, relative to my classmates, but the truth is, I had no confidence in myself. I wrote like a scared kid, and subconsciously I knew it.

It wasn’t until my 3rd year at State that writing began to make sense to me. Similar to the moment that I had in Mrs. Arf’s first grade classroom, something clicked for me while I was writing a paper in this summer Shakespeare Film class. I remember sitting my room on Gunson Street, starting at the wall (old habits die hard), when something hit me. I realized that I didn’t really care what the instructor thought of my paper. I decided to just write it exactly as I wanted to, completely detached from my opinion of what the instructor would, or wouldn’t think of it. That was one of the best papers I had written, and my grade reflected that.

Confidence in oneself, I believe, is the key to unlock one’s own writing potential. Without confidence in who you are, what you believe, and most importantly what you feel, you cannot write successfully. Writing is hard enough as it is, without the added obstacle of personal inhibitions to slow you down. Until you can stand up, and simply say “I don’t give a fuck about what anyone else thinks,” you cannot live up to your potential.

I’ll be the first one to admit that I’m a work in progress, and I’m far from becoming a decent writer. You never know, thought, I might turn out alright someday. If not, I can always become a professional superhero tracer; I hear there’s a market for that Japan.