The Loves of my Writing Life

 I am a writer.

As I type that out, I immediately want to erase it, take it back, and blush with embarrassment.

I am not classically trained, or frankly, trained at all. Until a year ago, I had no idea what passive voice was (or how much I liked using it). I struggled to teach my own students writing conventions because I often didn't know them myself. I have learned more about prefixes and suffixes as well as Latin and Greek roots from my second grade sons this year than I ever remember learning in school. I hated my linguistics class in college. My writing was called "too fluffy" by a professor in one of my masters classes. 

Yet, somehow, for as long as I can remember, I've always written. Writing has actually been a HUGE part of my life. I love it. I fall in love with it in different ways as time goes on. Because this time of year is full of love and thinking about our loved ones, I thought I would write a love note of some kind to writing. These are the loves of my writing life...

My Diaries

I was totally a kid that kept a diary. I had more than one. One of my diaries had a lock and key; it was so awesome! My sister Colleen, who shared a room with me for dang near twenty years tried to break into that thing more than once. There were times in my life when I would habitually write every single day and then I'd go through phases where I wouldn't write for weeks or even months. The diaries were always there, though- a great way for me to release my emotions, work through feelings, let aggression out. Writing my thoughts had been a part of me since early elementary school. 

The other purpose of my diary is one that has been a thread throughout my whole life- wanting to find ways to capture moments and memories so that I could look back on them when I was older. I think that's one of the main reasons I fell in love with writing.  It preserves my story, my place, in this big world. 

The Book I Wrote in Middle School

Learning how to be a good typist was something super important to me growing up. I would sit at my parents old Apple computer, the one that only had the color green, and play typing game after typing game from floppy disks. I got to be pretty freaking good if I do say so myself. Once I had passed on from the typing programs we had and we got that next computer with the smaller disks that was actually IN color, I began to write a book. 

It was about a group of friends in middle school learning about friendship, finding their way, having crushes on one another. The names were made up, but a lot was based on real events or the way I wished things would go. I wrote and wrote and wrote sometimes for hours. The book ended up being over 250 pages. I called it The Life of a Teenager. The natural thing is to wonder what ever happened to it. The short answer is nothing. I knew I could never print out that much and as computers morphed so did their way of saving and I never did anything with it. I found so much joy reading it aloud, adding to it, and would often think about it looking forward to time when I could work on it. 

A Poetry Journal I Kept by my Bedside 

When I entered high school, my diary and book writing came to a pretty big halt. I think a lot of it had to do with the amount of writing I was REQUIRED to be doing that made me feel like I didn't have as much time or energy to write because I WANTED to. That's a huge problem with schools sometime- all the 'have tos' squash some of the 'want tos.' I can't tell you how many of my former students come back and talk to me about how they feel like they have no time to read for pleasure because of the amount of reading they have to do at school as they get older. It really is a buzzkill sometimes.

Despite the fact that I was more busy, I still felt that pull to express my emotions in some way. I began waking in the middle of the night having the need to write. It's one of my favorite feelings, when you just HAVE to write. The writing I was doing was different- it was shorter, more feelings based and falling out of me in poems. So, my poetry journal was born. I kept it next to my bed as I often did my most creative work in the wee hours. This still holds true for me. In fact, I started writing this at 3am driving home from Florida recently. I was full of Dashboard Confessional level teenage angst around love and acceptance. I've got more than one poem about a boy that I kept feeling a pull to, but we could never quite get the timing right as we went back and forth from friendship to more than friends many exhausting times (hello, husband of thirteen years). Poetry was a new type of writing for me and I LOVED it. It's actually been a long time since I wrote poetry and I'm feeling myself getting back into it. 

Junior Year Creative Writing Class

I took extra English classes in high school and my absolute FAVORITE was a creative writing class. It may be the best class I ever took. The teacher was quirky and kind and pushed me. She could tell that I loved to write even though I had no idea what I was doing or what a predicate was (still probably don't). She recognized that I wasn't that kind of writer and allowed me to fully express myself. Going to her class was fun, doing the work was enjoyable, and I have kept every single thing I wrote in there.

One of my favorite pieces she had us do was a story where we would blow up and stretch out sixty seconds of our life. I wrote about asking a boy (not my husband of thirteen years I mentioned above) to our Sadie Hawkins dance. Specifically, about him walking up to me from across the library and me waiting there knowing he would either tell me yes or no. I am so grateful for teachers and curriculums that give students an environment to learn AND love the work they do. It let me rediscover my love for writing when I felt like I didn't have time to do it otherwise. 

Writing This Blog

College came and went, my masters came and went. I was no longer writing for enjoyment- I was writing to fulfill a requirement of a class. I writing was constantly judged and evaluated. Sometimes harshly, sometimes favorably. I would spend a semester trying to figure out how I needed to write to please a professor and then I'd learn it all over again for the next class. I was a language arts major so I wrote A LOT- paper after paper after paper after paper. The joy of writing was sucked right out of me, truly. Writing about the communication patters in novels before the year 1,000 was not doing it for me. Writing twelve page lesson plans for a thirty minute activity was also not doing it for me. Once I got into the classroom and wrote alongside my students, I slowly found my love for writing again. I found some of my purpose and passion.

After struggling with infertility and about to suffer my second miscarriage, I wrote a post on Facebook called "Miscarriage: Not a Conversation Starter." I shared, for the first time, that we were struggling to have a baby and start our family. I had shared my feelings and emotions just like I always had- with my pen or my fingers. I found empathy and sympathy, deep connection and understanding through that post and it felt really, really good when I was in a pit of hopelessness. I kept writing my story- all the treatments and medicines, all the doctors appointments and ultrasounds, the good, bad and ugly. I didn't stop. Now, almost exactly 9 years later, and well over 280 posts later, I am still here doing the same. Preserving my story, my place, in this big world.

Writing is One of the Loves of My Life

This blog and my newly ignited passion for writing has spilled over and opened a few doors for me that I am truly grateful for. I've wrote educational curriculum both for my own classroom and for a larger audience and I've found it to be one of my very favorite things about teaching. My classroom, teaching partner, and I were featured in a published book. I am now writing blog posts and micros for Lansing Moms too.

It's no surprise to any of you here that this pandemic has really done a number on me. I've lost myself in the suffocation of this time, in giving, giving, giving tirelessly to my boys until I am more exhausted than I've been since I had a newborn. Even though I've had hardly any time to myself, even though I am spent both physically and emotionally, I've kept writing throughout this time. In fact, I've wrote more than I ever have. That is a clear testament, to me, of how much I need to write and how much I truly love it.    

From the little girl writing in her diary, to the teenager creating poetry as she tried make sense of who she is, to the adult typing, sometimes through tears, sometimes while boys are literally crawling all over her, writing has always there. It is truly one of the loves of my life.