Why You Shouldn’t Listen To Other People

I’ve always written.
I’m not sure I’ve always called myself a writer — granted I’ve also never been one to agonize over the label in a tug-of-war-game of Am I Or Am I Not (For Real Though?), instead assuming the identity of “writer” as breezily as I do things like my astrology sign and my gender; something I just am — but I do know for certain that for almost as long as I’ve understood how to put a string of sentences together to make a coherent statement, I have.

I want to share the story of what it looked like. I’m not sure it’s told the best way — and I’m sure I’ll figure out a better way to tell it going forward — but here’s the message as it came out when I wrote it.

Elementary school
In first or second grade, we were asked to write a short story. I wrote about a dog named Muffin. I don’t remember any of it, but I’m sure it was the likes of childhood Pulitzer for Fiction. (It was not.) It was, however, a real story — so much so that it got a little out of hand and couldn’t be “wrapped up”— Muffin, it turned out, had a great many adventures to go on, and she was still midway into them when the day came to turn it in. So I didn’t.

This was the first of many missed deadlines.

My teacher, no doubt agonizing over the suspense of What Will Happen To Muffin, asked me about it. I said I’d have it the next day. I said this more than once.

When I finally gave it to her, she looked down at my thick stack of papers covered front and back in my oversized child’s scrawl, and said to me, “if you needed more time, you should’ve just said so.”

It was then that I realized other students had not written that much.

It was also my first lesson in what I later learned were “soft deadlines.”

The teacher liked my story, though. And apparently it (probably in combination with my reading level and perhaps other factors not least of which were some rudimentary testing and undoubtedly my irrefutable charm, aloof and awkward child I was) qualified me for the “gifted and talented” program — which included “language arts.”

This was the real beginning of my writing education.

It was also the last of any teacher’s praise. Until my senior year of college.

Middle school
We had the same “GT” language arts teacher all three years, and by the time eighth grade rolled around, she’d assign us essays on transcendentalism and utopia, then eye only me as she said,

“These essays are due Friday. That means I want to receive them on Friday.”

I adored her.

She tolerated me.