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STEP 1

 

Preliminary Thoughts: Why do I Write

  • Personally

    • To tell stories

    • To connect, to figure myself out

    • To document my own memories

  • Professionally

    • Necessary skill to have (as a journalist)

  • To become a better writer/speaker

  • Constantly editing myself as I speak as well

STEP 2

 

Bifurcation: Preliminary Thoughts Expanded

 

I am forever trying to understand myself as a “writer”. The very term feels fraudulent on my fingertips and foreign on the tip of my tongue- a word I could never quite squeeze myself into. There are so many individual parts of myself that are still growing. There are so many characters within me that are straining to develop their voices, and so many that lay dormant. This, for me, is the most pivotal aspect of being a wrier: these voices. Being a writer for me is not a career. It does not bind me to a life of quiet lakesides and pensive evenings with a quill in my hand. It does not condemn me to a life hidden behind a stack of unpublished papers in a musty room full of old antiques. It doesn’t hole me into a thousand different starbucks’ with my laptop growing out of my fingertips like an inseparable appendage. Being a writer, for me, is realizing that these characters are going to forever crop up. They will be born through random dialogues in the most inconvenient times. They will demand to speak with such an undeniable conviction that my own voice is caught off guard. They allow me to live a thousand lives outside of my own body. One of my favorite Fitzgerald quotes puts this most effectively: “Writers aren’t people exactly…they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”

            At this moment, in my life, I am coming together as the person I’m going to be for the rest of my life. All of the parts, the sides, the shades of gray are joining to form this coherent being; yet, in this syndication there is an undeniable breaking apart of that being. I am coming together to become a thousand different perspectives. The person I am, is essentially a bifurcation of countless perspectives and thoughts. And that is frightening, but its exhilaratingly so. It’s terrifying to realize that I am a million different people combined. They’re constantly fighting to be ever-present, unaware of the fact that I couldn’t banish them if I tried. These characters, these perspectives, whatever they are, are so deeply embedded within me that its taken 18 years to even to feel them. Its taken all this time to realize that its not different phases I’m going through or pivotal moments that are changing me, but rather different people and experiences that are pulling these voices form within my being. They were always there, and there are thousands more that will emerge as I mature. The fiber of my very being will continue to weave itself together only to rip itself apart. It is honestly the most beautifully broken system I have ever come across…and its me. It is all within the person, the being that sits here toiling in this revelation, weeding through its contradictions, smiling through tears as I realize this revelation of 18 years will lead only to more answerable questions about these characters of creation.

            Within this system of characters, is an inextricable desire to tell stories, my own, others and those who belong to nobody in particular. The most seemingly mundane people have incredible stories to be told, but sometimes cannot bring themselves to breathe life into their words. After living one’s own story, it becomes difficult to extricate yourself from them and have the conviction to tell it from another perspective. That is what I want to do. In whatever medium, in whatever mode, I want voices to be heard and my voice to be a vessel for characters. From the characters that emerge from myself, to those I meet in a collision on the sidewalk, I want to toil in the stories to be told.

 

STEP 3

 

Chosen Exercepts to use and explore:

 

Excerpt 1

 

I wish I could record this year on a VCR and watch it with you.  You can barely rewind on a VCR without it getting all jumbled up and caught up. That’s how I feel about my past year here; I could never do it over without ruining it all. It’s pristine, untouched in its imperfection. But there are so many moments I wish you could have seen, not been there but just seen. I would put this warm, sunny filter on the foreground of some memories. I would change the soundtrack in the background. I can make times sunnier, even if originally they couldn't have been rainier. I can paint my past technicolor and then I can make my present glow, and my future burst with neon. But we get so tangled in the rewinding and pausing and screen-shotting and freeze-framing and picture in picture that we lose the big picture in all our details. I want to go back to the times of VCR. Times when you can only move forward because any risk of looking back would ruin everything.

 

 

I feel emotionally jetlagged. Like this sadness catches up to me and I simply can't bridge the time gap between the high and low.

 

Because in this spectrum that I'm caught in; there is an extreme of happiness. Blissful, untainted, beautiful, dizzying happiness. And if in a reach a deep-seated sadness, I can each that profound joy.

 

Excerpt 2

And then there's Michigan. With its 3 bars that would never survive for a second in NYC’s critical palate. And I’m in love with it with its depth, such life. There are no pretenses, no strained laughter- only boisterous roaring’s and a sense of love and camaraderie so strong it throbs overwhelmingly in the back of your head. There is a freedom ringing through the air that makes you believe in everything and anything, in you. It's like Pompeii frozen in a beautiful time, waiting to be rediscovered...staying the same only as long as you do.

 

She wouldn't spend a second of her collegiate career away from those lit streets and jagged brick buildings. She got so wound up in the haphazard feelings flying out of every experience and seeping into her pores beneath her skin. She spent some nights on rooftops, just to feel on top of the world when she felt as if she hit rock bottom...just to remember how small everything can look with some distance. And that's why we remember the highs. Sitting here now with some distance, I can only see the good rising like sky scrapers from a rock bottom. The people, the sounds, the eyes, the arms, the comfort, the hush and lull, the noise and the rush. It was all beauty to be missed and vibrancy to be remembered but never to be recreated, to relive only in moments behind shut eyelids and warm summer air.

 

Excerpt 3

In the endless stretches of the physical spaces we encounter, it’s easy to forget how infinite our minds are. We press away unwanted memories. We smudge away unpleasant faces. We erase the imprints of foreign snapshots. The recesses of our own minds are not bound by the finite boundaries of a thick skull. We tuck and whittle away at the unpleasant. The truth is our past is riddled by pain. Some big. Some small. All relative. We have all found loneliness in once-bright eyes. We’ve all felt ourselves shake for inexplicable reasons. We’ve all made it harder than it has to be. We are creatures subject to circumstance. That we cannot help. Time will find sadness in our past and we will place it in our future. The present is entirely ours though. I do not mean present as in this year, this month, this week, this day, this hour. I do not mean present in even this second. Circumstance pervades time. I mean present in this moment.

 

This moment in which my entire world is this screen. The moment earlier when I closed my eyes and let Jaime’s laugh find mine and they reverberated in unison. The moment that camera found. The one where my hair was drying in beachy waves and I smiled as you dipped what you promised that was your last pretzel in nutella. I knew it wasn’t mine. When I lay in Di’s bed later that night, looked at each of those pictures, and I could feel the sun on my bare legs again.  That moment I landed I glanced out a small tight window and I saw all the flashing, lit promise of New York City. Those moments transcend time to capture a sphere of happiness.
 

Excerpt 4

When everything starts to move too quickly and the ground becomes molten under your very feet, that's when you'll start to appreciate the people who remain. Those who, after not seeing them for weeks or months, take off right where you left off. As if your whole world hadn't shifted and shaped itself into a new creation during that lapsed time. As if you hadn't lost and found yourself a thousand times over. All that time will shrink and fade to a single point when you see them. And in that singularity, the ground is solid beneath your feet again. Those constant faces in a sea of change will keep you afloat and treading even the most tumultuous waters. As you immerse yourself in challenges beyond your imagination, limited by what you believe is possible, the world starts to reveal opportunities beyond those limits. Time simply won't allow that future to unfold while clinging to those in your past. That's when the people who can permeate past rigid pretenses of present and past emerge. In their ability to make time irrelevant, they embed themselves into your future. They allow for you to grow and grow with the security of knowing you will always have an ever present part of your past in your unforeseeable future.

 

STEP 4

 

By combining the ideas from the first piece with these exerpts I find in my phone, I began to weave my way throgh my essay.

Below is my first draft for the essay. 

 

I suppose my earliest perspective on writing was as a gift. I recall a lit Christmas tree with gifts piled beneath or a birthday cake siting on our dining room table, surrounded by wrapped presents. Being the youngest in my family, I never quite had the disposable income to buy a gift, nor would I really have great insight on what gift to buy out there in the real world. Rather, I had an idealistic perspective of the world in my nucleus of my own home. My home was warm, full of love and support and the three people I valued above all else. All these feelings of warmth surmounted into countless writings that became my gifts to my family. Every holiday or birthday, I would give a card or a poem or a story explicating something meaningful, something I knew would touch that person. That was always my greatest gift to give and it was always lovingly received.

            As I grew older, I realized each year that this gift was not just one to give to others, but one to nurture for myself. My parents, and especially my brother, began to point out this was a unique propensity that I should explore in a more structured realm. Just at that same time, my teachers began to encourage me to submit my writings to school magazines, or share them with the class or write for the newspaper. All these outlets began to emerge as ways and reasons to write and so I delved into this new world where writing was not just something that happened to make others feel, but to make others and myself think. However as I entered the academic sphere, I realized my writing, once effortlessly lively, was being strangled by rules and regulations. Academic writing, essays, short answers on exams, a cutthroat high school began to chip away at my love for written word. Like any fire, though, it couldn’t be stifled for too long and it found another space. I began to write stories, eventually longer, my writing developed into a novel. I invested myself into the world I created in my spare time. I created elaborate character arcs, an ever-growing plotline, a research document, a quote page, an outline, among many parts. I never thought too much about it other than an entertaining side hobby. However, looking back I realize I wrote to create a more exciting reality apart the sometimes-stifling atmosphere of competitive high-schoolers an unwelcome acronyms ranging from SAT, Act and GPA. I wrote to create a place of solace, to figure myself out. When my reality seemed unsatisfying, I created another space with my writing[AN1] .

            However, these instances of writing were circumstantial[AN2] . They emerged out of a time when I needed writing to be something, a gift or an escape. However, I want to focus on what writing was, is and always will be to me, even in extenuating circumstances. Writing is a way to create connections, within others and myself. I have always been a relatively closed person to those I don’t know, even myself at times, I do not always to explore parts of myself that are emotionally compromising. I feel weak or unable to reach my full potential in these situations. However, I recognize its also inefficient to keep this hindrances and emotions locked inside my mind, bouncing around and blocking out productivity. So firstly, I use writing to explicate my own emotional situations when they become too overwhelming. I do believe that we’ve all been strangers in our mind at times and to me, that’s a little scary, but overall it’s exhilarating. We all have moments when the situation, place or people in our lives begin to invade the personal mental space we reserved for reason. In those moments, I write. This serves two purposes. Firstly, I create something productive of an otherwise unproductive situation. Instead of being upset or simply crying or vent, I write. I create at least one gem of a sentence, one connection of words that had I never been that upset, I would have never created. And once the emotions fades and the situation become irrelevant, I still have that eloquent, charged piece of writing .

            Secondly , in writing in these times of change. I chronicle my most overwhelming times. Those times are often the pivotal moments that we learn the most about ourselves and there’s something immeasurably valuable to be able to express how I feel in that moment, and most of all, to be able to look back and relive those moments through those readings. Freshman year of college is a whirlwind, but somehow that doesn’t do it justice. In a moment of feeling my lowest low, I came to a realization that I often look back on. In this passage I realized that I may not have control over my situation, but I do have control over the lens through which perceive my past, present and future .

 

“I can put a filter on the foreground of my memories. I can change the soundtrack in the background. I can make times sunnier, even if originally they couldn’t have been rainier. I can paint my  past technicolor and then I can make my present glow and future burst with neon.”

 

The notes section on my phone is full of these post-it revelations. Another grapples with the issue of growing with the changing relationship with my brother as geographic distance and situational distances crept into our bond, one that is arguably one of, or the most, important bond in my life.

 

“But we still are. We’re till exactly as this song feels, at our core. But we get so tangled in the rewinding and pausing and screenshotting and free-framing and the screen in a screen that we lose the big picture in all of our details. I want to go back to the times of VCR, times when you can only move forward because any risk of looking back would ruin everything.”

 

It’s a wonderful feature, because often times, I don’t understand the true meaning of what I’m writing as I first create it. But as I look back at many of the snippets like the one above, it could not be clearer. In this case, I was trying so hard to fit into the same box my brother and I had built[AN7]  for ourselves over the years, I was losing the magic of the moments we were in. By trying to pause each moment and share it in the same modes of the past, I wasn’t enjoying our wonderful present. I wonder if I had not learned this issue myself through writing how many more times of difficulty would have been encountered due to the same mistake. 

 

One of my favorite passages has to do with friendships. I have watched my father’s and his best friend’s friendship traverse the most difficult times. From losses of all kinds from, death to heartbreak, to incredible moments of triumph, their friendship has only become stronger. Their bond and my growing ones with my current friends inspired the clip below[AN8] .

 

“When everything starts to move too quickly and the ground becomes molten under your very feet, that's when you'll start to appreciate the people who remain. Those who, after not seeing them for weeks or months, take off right where you left off. As if your whole world hadn't shifted and shaped itself into a new creation during that lapsed time. As if you hadn't lost and found yourself a thousand times over. All that time will shrink and fade to a single point when you see them. And in that singularity, the ground is solid beneath your feet again. Those constant faces in a sea of change will keep you afloat and treading even the most tumultuous waters. As you immerse yourself in challenges beyond your imagination, limited by what you believe is possible, the world starts to reveal opportunities beyond those limits. Time simply won't allow that future to unfold while clinging to those in your past. That's when the people who can permeate past rigid pretenses of present and past emerge. In their ability to make time irrelevant, they embed themselves into your future. They allow for you to grow and grow with the security of knowing you will always have an ever present part of your past in your unforeseeable future.”

 

I remember this passage coming to me effortlessly as I witnessed the raw potential of their bond. Again, I didn’t fully know if I knew what I meant by this piece but as I look back at it I realize I admire and want my own friendships to be this meaningful. I want them to surpass time and pretenses.

 

These writings are a few that I have chronicled that have enabled me to make meaningful connections from situations that seemed desolate at times. They have helped me understand others and myself in a much deeper sense. That is why I write. I write to create a space for myself where, even if I do not immediately understand yet, I have laid out a map for my future self to connect the dots. I lay out a blueprint to be colored in and become a foundation to build myself upon. 

 

From here I continued revising until I reached my final version which can be found here

 

 

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