Writing was always a constant battle in my life.

I was placed in ESL (English Second Language) classes since elementary, and few times, kids would spit insults at me while I stood there, without even understanding what they meant.

That was the beginning of my literacy narrative.

I was always turned off by the restrictions of grammar, all the rules I had to follow, and the formats that kept me bored.

Why wasn’t I allowed to do this?

Or this?

Maybe I could start a paragraph without an indention.

“‘Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip,’ Jonathan would say, other times, ‘is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thoughts and you break the chains of your body too….’” -Richard Bach in Jonathan Livingston Seagull

But everywhere I looked, they were all the same. The same sentence structure, the same questions, the same depth of comprehension and the same grade I would get back on my essays. They were all chained by the rules, and the shackles of the same format.

They told me to follow the rubric so I did.

They told me to write about Shakespeare so I did.

They told me that writing was fun,

but they were lying.

They didn’t teach me how to write.

The grades on my paper did not reflect how good of a writer I was, and the writing that I wrote did not reflect who I was. I was merely doing what I thought I was supposed to do. That kind of thinking restricted my own creativity. It was as if I had been walking in a pair of shoes, two sizes

too small.

Writing for me,

was mundane,

uncreative,

crippling,

definitive,

and mind-numbingly meaningless.

It seemed to me that the words written on the pages were not of my own,

the sentences repeated itself,

and the paragraphs had rambled on about some nonsense in my head.

[Every] [word] [I] [wrote], [I] [was] [imprisoning] [myself] [in] [a] [coffin] [of] [suffocating] [structure].

Intro,

body,

body,

body,

and the conclusion would be the death of my last remaining smudge of creativity.

“But when at last I wrote my first words on the page, I felt an island rising beneath my feet like the back of a whale. As more and more words emerged, I could finally rest: I had a place to stand for the first time in my life. The island grew, with each page, into a continent inhabited by people I knew and mapped with the life I lived.” -Coming into Language by Jimmy Santiago Baca

I searched for what Baca was talking about. The freedom literature allowed was very foreign in my own experiences at the time. My previous self would have been in disbelief of such an idea. Because writing was just another assignment that I didn’t want to do, it was never something I had done on my own.

Now when I read Baca’s essay, I feel a strong connection, liberated from the two wingtips of my body. His articulations repeated what I wanted to say in his own language, yet resonated with mine. My affection for writing was a late discovered passion through trial and error of which were many errors. After some time and series of revelations, the profound interest in literature would grow farther than my own imagination.

It wasn't until my first year in college when writing became anything more than an assignment. The big change was when I started writing a personal journal. It was a summer night after I had graduated from high school. I had just come home from a party; I was drunk or high or all of the above. I sat down outside of my house, face in my palms, and comforted myself in silence. In few months I would head off to college. There wasn’t a clue of what I was capable of because I had never tested my abilities. And in my lack of sense of direction, the chances at success seemed far more improbable than my conscious mind had tried to admit. It was at that revelation where I realized my urgent need for change. I had to do something that would pick me back up from the hole I was digging myself in.

Writing a journal

was my attempt to regain the control of myself by creating a record of my identity, my own ideas, and to analyze them for comprehensible data. I started believing that all the things I had kept a record of will benefit me in ways that were unforeseeable at the moment. It forced me to experiment, and to communicate parts of my life that were so private that I had tried to hide them even to myself. Ideas, abstracts, poems, analogies, rap lyrics, and doodles began filling up the empty spaces in the notebook. This was the first time I had ever enjoyed writing and “[my] race to learn had just begun (Bach)."

Although my previous experiences of writing were painful, this type of writing felt quite contrary to what I once believed them to be. Every word I wrote was a relief and my mind was emptied of all the anxiety as the tip of the pen crashing down, spilling all my crashing thoughts onto the pages of the journal. I no longer cared about the rules anymore. Within the four corners of the paper, I had only my own set of rules to convey the raw voice in my head without any requirements forced upon the tip of my fingers. Writing became more enjoyable.

“I wrote about it all—about people I had loved or hated, about the brutalities and ecstasies of my life. And, for the first time, the child in me who had witnessed and endured unspeakable terrors cried out not just in impotent despair, but with the power of language. Suddenly, through language, through writing, my grief and my joy could be shared with anyone who would listen. And I could do this all alone; I could do it anywhere. I was no longer a captive of demons eating away at me, no longer a victim of other people’s mockery and loathing, that had made me clench my fist white with rage and grit my teeth to silence. Words now pleaded back with the bleak lucidity of hurt. They were wrong, those others, and now I could say it.” (Baca)

It wasn't that when I started writing, all of the sudden I was saved. When you fight your way out of a sunken ship, you aren’t instantly relieved from the fear of death when you find something buoyant to hold on to,

but, it does allow you to stay afloat.

And when you are able to stay afloat, it allows you to go.

This is best described in the book The Alchemist by Paul Coelho, “It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”

Writing was not my dream,

it wasn’t my dream to become a writer,

but it helped me realize that what I wrote,

could one day become a reality.

I still remember the first time I had encountered The Alchemist was when my interest in literature was at its all time low. Then I read this book again after the switch, and I was so glad that the book had found me. Coelho, as described in his book, had spoken the language of the world, into my own life. This time, my own writing had been my guide. All the pieces of my thoughts so vividly guided me to where I wanted to be next. They acted as a compass and the stars in the sky that would so gladly show where I needed to be headed. My articles reassured my beliefs, and so I felt more confident as I read out my own voice. And while it took extraordinary efforts to remind myself everyday to write something profoundly genuine, the reason why I never quit journaling was because, without it, I had no other place for me to

stand.

In all honesty, writing, was not only a place of encouragement but also a counselor for self-refection. I was saddened by the irreplaceable pages of stagnancy that had gone by. Before college, I was very far from a model student. My junior year of high school, I was arrested along with my friends at the time for stealing alcohol from a local grocery chain. My grades were barely presentable to my Mom. I had absolutely no idea of the future, but an unfounded hope that one day everything was going to be okay. Because English was a foreign, unnatural language and because of the fact that I was so uninterested in communicating with others, I naturally strayed away from reading and writing. There was an invisible, but very real, language barrier between me and the other kids in the playground. However, continuing to develop into a writer made me realize that words are incredibly powerful. Words conveyed tone and emotions far better than my drawings ever could. The pieces I read, to all of which had struck to me at various times, were all uniquely flavored by each specific moment. Those moments I will never be able to relieve again, but my thoughts stayed with me until the present. Now I was able to speak my own language.

Almost two years down the road as a writer,

I am more aware of the place I wanted to be. But like

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

or

Santiago,

I’m not completely sure of the place I’m headed nor of the things I’m doing. My hope is that with writing and a series of other artistic abilities, I will be able to leave my foot print of existence in history. Because, in the end, language is no longer a barrier but a tool of communication,

and I want to communicate with the world, the story

I am.

“Through language I was free. I could respond, escape, indulge; embrace or reject earth or the cosmos. I was launched on an endless journey without boundaries or rules, in which I could salvage the floating fragments of my past, or be born anew in the spontaneous ignition of understanding some heretofore concealed aspect of myself. Each word steamed with the hot lava juices of my primordial making, and I crawled out of stanzas dripping with birth-blood, reborn and freed from the chaos of my life. The child in the dark room of my heart, who had never been able to find or reach the light switch, flicked it on now; and I found in the room a stranger, myself, who had waited so many years to speak again. My words struck in me lightning crackles of elation and thunderhead storms of grief.” (Baca)