“You clearly don’t know the first thing about writing a paper.” She handed me a stack of 8x11s filled with red marks. I thought I even saw a smirk creep around her lips.
I was 23. Two years earlier, the top tier English programs rejected me. I decided to give grad school a shot again after taking time to meander around Cape Cod.
Simmons, City College/CUNY and Colorado State all offered me a place.
Colorado won out. Blame the mountains. And here I was, red-faced and grasping a paper that I swear, burned the tips of my fingers.
And swear I did. Internally. It was new, this cursing thing, as I explored the vulgar world that lay outside the walls of my Christian youth.
Fucking bitch. What a pathetic woman! A sad, has-been writer teaching a class of competitive English students. I don’t know how to write a paper? I had a 4.0 in English! I was a TA! I don’t know how to write a paper?
I promptly left the class and never returned.
But that was my way. Leave, with a “fuck you” trailing behind.
It didn’t stop the embarrassment from settling into my bones, where it would swoop up again in a galestorm when faced with the slightest criticism. Who I was. How I wrote. The way I dressed.
It hurt.
I always considered myself a writer. Before anything else. Harriet the Spy started it. That shy, geeky girl was me: notebook tucked around her hand, observing the world with a wisdom far beyond her years. Still separate from the crowd, trying to comprehend it all.
My journals saved me.
They were the place I explored all of the voices: God’s, a shouting father, chattering girls, the boys who ignored me, my orange cat. Those crisp white pages with perfect alignment kept the chaos at bay. It was where I could wander in safety.
And then there was that one journal entry that changed everything.
I was 13. Endurance. That was life then: endurance. If I can make it to 18, I can leave. Hike the Appalachian Trail. Go to college. Leave and never come back.
My journal and God heard my innermost thoughts. But even then, I trusted my journal more.
Until the night I left it in the family car, after falling asleep in the backseat from hours on the road.
When I woke, she wasn’t there with me.
And then, my father’s voice.
The voice that meant everything was about to come crashing to a halt, and I quickly assessed just how hurt I’d be after his rage was over.
He called me outside and it wasn’t even a minute before my back pressed against green metal siding. I could feel the sparks of spit and naily pinches soon after. My father hit where he could — palms open so that he wasn’t actually beating me, as he was a Christian man — and I covered my fragile breasts. I was nearly his height but hadn’t learned yet the ways silencing him through the power of my eyes.
“What is this?” he screamed, shaking my journal in front of my glasses.
I knew which entry. It was the newly written one, the one with the list. Who I hated.
They both were on it, Dad and Mom. Dad was #1.
He didn’t stop there. He thumbed through my journal, commanding me to read certain portions, including the list of people I hated. It seemed that he had availed himself of the entire book, which included my secret thoughts over how it would feel to kiss a friend of my brother’s .
I wept as one condemned. My humiliation was complete. My father would look at me with triumphant eyes whenever he had the chance — because indeed, he knew all of my secrets.
And I swore that day that I would never write my inmost thoughts again.
Except that’s the thing about writing: once vulnerability locks up, everything suffers.
And when your writing is called to task 10, 20, 30 years later, that young girl may still be sobbing against green metal siding. She may still be forming a fuck you in teenage scribble. She may be walking out of the classroom where no one cares to stop her.
But the words remain, patiently waiting to be liberated.