#since my dad has been my most enthusiastic supporter and ally in chasing my dreams

[jasper-dracona]

So uhhh I was just gonna make an addition to this in the tags, but i didn’t realize how verbose I was gonna be, so I ran out of tags. So I’m gonna continue it up here cause I don’t wanna rewrite all the tags:

But writing the words “maybe I won’t become a palaeontologist” caused me to burst into tears in class. I pushed through and kept writing to finish off the piece, but something in my heart had snapped like a twig.

I used short snappy sentences and repetition to show my anger, fear, frustration, and most importantly, my constant anxious thoughts that kept giving me anxiety attacks during tests. Telling me over and over again that I was never gonna make it. That I was stupid. That I’d never make it into university, let alone survive it.

This also, conveniently, was a motif in the text.

Anyways, a week or two later I got the grade back for that piece, and if I’m remembering right, it was pretty solid. But I didn’t… really care about that, which was very weird for me at the time. But for some reason I just wanted to have it back. Despite the pain I felt in writing that phrase, I felt an inexplicable urge to read it again. So, when I got it back, I tucked it away in my backpack.

That night, sitting at my desk, up too late, I pulled the pieces of looseleaf out of my bag, and read what I had wrote in full. Most of it was still just as visceral as when I had written it, and while it was emotional, it didn’t bring me to tears like it had before.

Until I read that phrase.

I sobbed for probably over an hour that night.

After that I made a consistent habit of digging out that piece, reading that line, and letting myself cry for a while whenever I was feeling hopeless about school or my future. And each time I did, it got a little easier to read. Slowly I was convincing myself that this wouldn’t be the end of the world, that things would be okay, that I would be okay.

And I think this was among the top 3 best things I ever did for myself. Along with going to my doctor about getting assessed for ADHD and a particular break up.

And now I keep journals with my most visceral of emotions in them, so that I can go back and read them over and over, and learn to accept how I feel, and my situation. I write prose and poems and unorganized swaths of thoughts and feelings. I draw, scratch and scribble with a shitty pen, with no care for beauty, just expression. (I did this a lot during anxiety attacks in my math quizzes and tests. I’ve lost most of them but I remember how much those made me feel too)

The idea is that if I keep writing and drawing these things, I’ll eventually come up with another of those twig-snapping phrases, or a visceral image, and I can look back on those and view them again and again, allowing me to process those emotions.

It’s cathartic and therapeutic, and I’m glad I learned to do it, all thanks to that shitty fucking chemistry test.

(GOD this ended up long, sorry lol)

So, okay, fun fact. When I was a freshman in high school… let me preface by saying my dad sent me to a private school and, like a bad organ transplant, it didn’t take. I was miserable, the student body hated me, I hated them, it was awful.

Okay, so, freshman year, I’m deep in my “everything sucks and I’m stuck with these assholes” mentality. My English teacher was a notorious hard-ass, let’s call him Mr. Hargrove. He was the guy every student prayed they didn’t get. And, on top of ALL OF THE SHIT I WAS ALREADY DEALING WITH, I had him for English.

One of the laborious assignments he gave us was to keep a daily journal. Daily! Not monthly or weekly. Fucking daily. Handwritten. And we had to turn it in every quarter and he fucking graded us. He graded us on a fucking journal.

All of my classmates wrote shit like what they did that day or whatever. But, I did not. No, sir. I decided to give the ol’ middle finger to the assignment and do my own shit.

So, for my daily journal entries, over the course of an entire year, I wrote a serialized story about a horde of man-eating slugs that invaded a small mining town. It was graphic, it was ridiculous, it was an epic feat of rebellion.

And Mr. Hargrove loved it.

It wasn’t just the journal. Every assignment he gave us, I tried to shit all over it. Every reading assignment, everyone gushed about how good it was, but I always had a negative take. Every writing assignment, people wrote boring prose, but I wrote cheesy limericks or pulp horror stories.

Then, one day, he read one of my essays to the class as an example of good writing. When a fellow student asked who wrote it, he said, “Some pipsqueak.”

And that’s when I had a revelation. He wanted to fight. And since all the other students were trying to kiss his ass, I was his only challenger.

Mr. Hargrove and I went head-to-head on every assignment, every conversation, every fucking thing. And he ate it up. And so did I.

One day, he read us a column from the Washington Post and asked the class what was wrong with it. Everyone chimed in with their dumbass takes, but I was the one who landed on Mr. Hargrove’s complaint: The reporter had BRAZENLY added the suffix “ize” to a verb.

That night I wrote a jokey letter to the reporter calling him out on the offense in which I added “ize” to every single verb. I gave it to Mr. Hargrove, who by then had become a friendly adversary, for a chuckle and he SENT IT TO THE REPORTER.

And, people… The reporter wrote back. And he said I was an exceptional student. Mr. Hargrove and I had a giggle about that because we both knew I was just being an asshole, but he and the reporter acknowledged I had a point.

And that was it. That was the moment. Not THAT EXACT moment, but that year with Mr. Hargrove taught me I had a knack for writing. And that knack was based in saying “fuck you” to authority. (The irony that someone in a position of authority helped me realize that is not lost on me.)

So, I can say without qualification that Mr. Hargrove is the reason I am now a professional writer. Yes, I do it for a living. And most of my stuff takes authorities of one kind or another to task.

Mr. Hargrove showed me my dissent was valid, my rebellion was righteous, and that killer slugs could bring a city to its knees. Someone just needs to write it.