For a long time, all my writing was simply about covering Student Government, and it wasn't making me happy. The moment I realized I had lost the plot was when some one-day-old Reddit account, made presumably for the sole purpose of harassing me, was telling me I had no value as a person because of what I wrote. That's when I realized I had grown to hate writing. No matter how much I tried to write the perfect article, to expose things the right way, there was some way I would fall short.
It took me writing to pen pals from across the world to remind me why I fell in love with writing in the first place.
The Six-Year-Old Who Understood
The experience brought back a deluge of memories from my childhood about how I used writing. I thought back to the six-year-old me sitting outside the Centerville Public Library one day, trying to write and illustrate my Wizard of Oz sequel. Like any seven-year-old boy, I was convinced the one thing the Wizard of Oz was missing was war, so I made some epic at a scale Herodotus would've been jealous of.
I thought back to writing a petition at nine years old. I was finishing standardized testing, the PARCC test, and choosing to, on the back of my scrap sheet of paper, write about how the tests created by Bush's No Child Left Behind were placing an undue burden on teachers and weren't doing what they were supposed to. My teacher took a picture of what I wrote and sent it to my mom to tell her how bright her precocious son was.
I think back to at ten, trying to create a petition to unban infection tag after it was banned when my friend Xander got a concussion while playing it after he tripped on a rope at our playground. Despite Xander's concussion, I still thought people should have the freedom to play infection on the playground, and I was willing to campaign for it. I passed around the petition like it was contraband to try and create change. At that age, I understood what writing was about.
Bridges Across Continents
While my University Student Government crusade on Generally Assembled was going on during Christmas Break, I also decided to sign back into my account on Global Penfriends, a site that allows you to speak with folks from all over the world through its chat system. In my few weeks on the platform, I had a tremendous time speaking to folks.
There was my Egyptian friend Joe, a young man older than me who spoke to his frustrations as a young man in an Egypt that no longer allowed him to express himself politically. When I brought up the Arab Spring offhandedly, you could almost see a light in his eye through text; the fact that someone from America knew about the event that was, for many politically active Egyptians, a great tragedy. An event that for two years gave them hope of meaningful change but ultimately failed to deliver. A man who looked at this site and marveled when his attempt to restart a magazine at his own university caused him to be flagged by university administration.
I think to my conversation with a Sri Lankan woman, Kauley, who taught me there was a contentment in stillness. Her days of living with her eight cats and reading on a swing chair outside her home. She spoke to her nervousness leaving for a university three hours from home for the first time in her life, and about her ambitions for making a change in this world that was bigger than herself in geography. I was struck with her humility to say she didn't know what the future would hold but still having the willingness to face it nonetheless. Or getting to speak to her about the beauty of sunlight catching the fur of a black cat just right.
I think of my conversations with Juliana from Brazil, who taught me more than I ever wanted to know about their standardized test, the ENEM. Juliana wanted desperately to score well enough to get into a public medical school that she took an entire gap year just to study for the exam. I learned that in Brazil they open Christmas presents at midnight after Christmas Eve festivities. She spoke with me the week going up to the ENEM to keep her mind off it and taught me numerous Portuguese curse words.
I think of speaking with Delfina from Argentina in Spanish, with her jokingly asking if my stiff academic Spanish was taught by a Spaniard because it was so unusual for a latina. But she still humored me and taught me that sports fans are called hinchas, and every time she would use a word of slang she would put in quotations the meaning of it. The difficulty of trying to explain the rules of American football in an entirely different language but trying nonetheless. Of talking about Maradona's Hand of God and J.T. Barrett's spot in the same breath.
What Writing Really Is
All these conversations reminded me that ultimately I didn't get into writing to try and prosecute or go on a crusade. I initially got into writing because it's an audacious attempt to build a bridge from one consciousness to another despite distance, difference, or time itself. How miraculous is it that I can render the formless chaos of my inner thoughts into something legible to someone living a life completely alien from my own? It's the written word alone that permits such a connection.
I don't necessarily state that I'm done writing investigative journalism, but I was given a new perspective on why I fell in love with writing in the first place. I hope for the rest of my life I never forget just how miraculous the written word is.
