This essay is a part of a new MWL series called “Becoming The Writer” where I unpack important and complex moments throughout my writing journey; both as a journal and a way for me to let you into my writing psyche over time.
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I was 15 years old when my mother drove from Cleveland, OH to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio for a two weeks writers workshop. Only weeks before, my mother found out that I was gay by rummaging through my room and reading my journal. As a teen that loved writing since I was 12, it was the utmost violation to have my mother stumble upon my life’s biggest secret through the medium that I loved.
How was I to make sense of my writing then? I thought.
“Don’t be about any of that foolishness while you’re here around these white kids,” my mother commanded before we left her truck to sign up for my dorm, “And you mess around with any boys here, I can have you checked by a doctor.”
I moved into my dorm with a white boy from a state that I don’t remember now. Those first few hours were spent shaking hands and introducing myself to teenagers from suburbs all around the country. I’d never really befriended a white person before, let alone lived with one in a dorm room. Although a scholarship kid around all these other kids around the country, I never felt othered because of the money my family made.
Above the strangeness of being transplanted to Gambier, OH was the wonder of dedicating myself to the writing workshops. We attended three workshops a day between our meals and had certain workshops sessions dedicated to certain genres. I was enraptured with the idea of filling my three-subject notebook by the end of the two weeks. I walked around campus and found other teenagers writing in various nooks and crannies. At the only bookshop in town, I sat between the aisles and chatted with another black teen writer there for hours. Candace was kind, had a friendly smile, and we unraveled our traumas to each other as we licked ice cream cones.
“What do you think it’s gonna be like when you have to go home?” Candace asked.
I thought and shrugged. Too terrified of the answer to say. Coming to Gambier, Ohio, I hadn’t anticipated that for the rest of my life, every place that I went, I would have the choice of whether or not to come out. For the first few days, I sweat in suspense after lying to my roommate in a panic about a supposed girlfriend I had back home. But on the first day of the workshop, I was clocked as gay by another gay teen from Cleveland. Though my writing had outed me to my mother, I now had the choice of how to out myself.
But in this new world, where I was honest about who I was, could writing save me?
During those two weeks, I ventured into writing essays and fiction for the first time. I filled my notebooks with sappy poetry about my family and what it felt like to try to grow up in the wake of such intimate destruction. Like everyone else, I wrote, which meant I had some strange tribe that I was not apart of.
I cold red to the class and noted feedback. I wrote an essay about winning a middle school presidential debate and while I read it to the class, they roared with laughter and my heart lept. For the first time in my life, I realized that my writing could move someone other than me. This alone changed my relationship with it and made it mine. It helped me steal back a part of something that had been stolen from me.
Some mornings, I walked to the library and chose a desk near the window, feeling like I’d jumped into some portal to the future.
To a place where I could be the kind of writer, or rather, the person that I truly wanted to be. Even at 15 years old, I knew that words could change my world. The words that are or aren’t said to us as children matter. So do the words that we exchange with our friends, bullies. The words that we find in the history books, out of the news anchor’s mouth in the morning, on the radio, from our teachers, and lovers. The stories we enter when we are born, the stories we are told as we grow; become the blueprint of who we are.
In one of my favorite. books as a teen, Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd, the main character, Dade Hamilton, grapples with his homosexuality, first love, and the crumbling of his parent’s marriage. Near the novel’s middle, Dade finds his father’s journal, something out of character for his parent, and learns of his father’s affair. This newfound intimacy drives home Dade’s desire for his parents to separate, for the illusions to end.
What does it mean for me to read a book about a teenager uncovering his parent’s secret through a journal when my own life was eviscerated by the same act? Literature can be a liberator and an entryway into our future, like the writer, Alexander Chee, once noted about the novel during a Breadloaf talk - “The novel as a remembering an old song.”
Sometimes we are attracted to what we fear the most.
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