For my whole life, I have been writing, but it was not until relatively recently that I found writing as a passion, a thing to not merely do so much as enjoy. I had always been a reader; whether it was horror, fantasy, realistic or anything in between I devoured fiction with an insatiable hunger, and in similar fashion I took to non-fiction. However, it never truly occurred to me where a book came from, or the manner by which a writer might bring a seemingly impossible idea into such life-like realism. This began to change when I was in 4th grade.
In every previous year of elementary school, I did not properly explore the realms of writing, but in 4th grade I received a new teacher: Ms. Silva. She was a younger woman and, if my memory doesn’t fail me, she was a specialist in everything relating to language arts. She quickly picked me up as a teacher’s pet, and in retrospect she very much was tutoring and nurturing my abilities as a writer. She stoked my interest in politics, supporting my decision to go to the New Hampshire Senate to speak on a law about the content in textbooks. She even told the class how proud she was that I was participating in politics. While I was embarrassed at the time, it was there that she doused my soul with gasoline. It was only a matter of time before I was in a blaze of ambition.
The next year I was in 6th grade, at the Academy for Science and Design. While somewhat lacking an advanced language arts program, I never stopped having that same drive to write. It was during this year that I absorbed some classics; Call of the Wild, Animal Farm, and the works of various other early writers became my fare. I can recall clearly more than one sleepless night caused by reading too much of H.P. Lovecraft, and at least once when a teacher had to take away a book to make me pay more attention in class. All this reading didn’t exactly make up for my lack of practice with writing, though; I still have documents from those days, and to be frank, the writing was still far below my standards for “good.”
Then in 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th grade came the days of Concerta, a stimulant anti-ADD drug. In retrospect, Concerta did far more harm to my state than it did good. I became much more anxious in those days. I wore down easier, and by the end of the day I had already expended all of my energy on school-work. What writing I did was few and far between, as far as I can tell, and while I joined the HBHS Writer’s Club in my freshman year of highschool, I still had a great poverty of creativity and a wealth of terrible ideas.
Perhaps the worst offender of the problems of my writing during this era was my failure to censor myself when it came time to censor myself, and an unwavering distrust in the authorities. I suspect that the latter was greatly magnified by my Concerta prescription. I distinctly recall more than one sleepless night brought on by a deep paranoia over the state of election. The former, however, was far more a symptom of never having to censor myself in the first place. ASD had heavily incentivized freedom of expression, and was particularly lax on certain matters due to the eccentricities of many of its students. As a result, HBHS seemed dictatorial in its content guidelines. However, over time I adjusted to scenario, especially after the results of the election in 2016, where after I almost completely ceased my use of any political content whatsoever, at least in part out of fear of retaliation from administration and peers alike.
And now we emerge out of the past and into the present. The journey for me as a writer has been long and hard. The path here is littered with hundreds of unfinished, half-baked ideas that would never work out, hours spent working hard to hone my skill, and empty documents and pages that I stared at whenever I was suffering from writer’s block. Nonetheless, I continue to persevere. I’ve become interested in political writing, sci-fi and horror. I want to keep working on my art, and I want to one day see it published. Even though the past was hard, I have a very good feeling about the future.
This is the first draft of an essay written for my Junior year AP Literature class.