Post Category → Writing

I am an adult.

1 year ago, I sat in an airport awaiting a flight to a city I had eagerly left – left with a tinge of bitterness, an insatiable desire to start anew, and a necessity to see something other than a Vietnamese supermarket and, on an exciting weekend, a plate of fried vegetables with a vat of ketchup at Chili’s.  The flight’s trajectory was the District of Columbia, the city in which I came to be, to Houston, the city of my birth that smells eerily similar to a Rainforest-themed restaurant.  Houston would no longer be the final destination as it was merely an extended layover to what was supposedly my final destination: San Francisco, California to become an English teacher extraordinaire.

I was going to teach children the rules of rudimentary, standardized-test friendly writing — writing so inconceivably mind-numbing and boring that, naturally, these children would internalize the rules in an effort to break them.  They were going to be the Orwells of their generation, the Dottys of their time, an army of scholars who uniformly believed with complete and utter conviction that the Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter is a classic – a classic worthy of nothing more than being a paperweight or, to be more kind, a projectile object set into motion amidst a backdrop of profanity.  I was going shape little writing elves in poetry circles and short story workshops.  I was going to create a classroom so inconceivably wonderful that the only appropriate visual equivalent would be a rainbow attached to a smiling, naïve sun with Richard Branson hoarding gold on the other side.  I was going to save this world one writing prompt about dreams, passion, and/or puppies at a time.  I was going to nurture and pat the heads of my queer-identified students and explain, “The details of my personal life, for reasons of legality, cannot be divulged but I support you and that flannel shirt.”  Cue frolicking, prancing deer and orchestra music here.

It has been a year.  A year since I awoke, 3 hours before my flight, surrounded by my unpacked belongings and frantically forced my roommates to stuff as many of my books, underwear, and Georgetown paraphernalia into my bags.  A year since I darted, Home Alone-style, down the terminal of Reagan airport.  A year since I had magically bypassed security and, driven by the guilt and the embarrassment of the previous 12 hours, opened this very laptop and began to write:

Hey Everyone!

Contrary to popular notion, I am not one for long mass e-mails, but as I sit at the airport, Texas bound, wearing the dress that I wore last night and surprised that I might be heading “home” in one piece, two things come to mind.  First, I need to live a more sustainable lifestyle.  Second, that I will miss everyone and everything about DC dearly – and the feeling so overwhelming that I feel compelled to write. 

I never finished the contents of the letter, but I did complete the list of people I had intended to send the message to.  There were 36 people, most of whom I saw less than a week ago upon returning to DC.  To repeat an oft-used phrase, last week was a “full-circle” moment – I had returned to my alma mater to see the very people I had listed only to espouse words eerily similar to what I had wrote.  Only to realize that although circumstances have changed, I, in many ways, have not and that it was time to.

It is a difference of context.  A year ago, I was certain that the teaching profession was my calling – that I was destined to bridge rhetoric and pedagogy in public education, that I was going to inundate every worksheet I made withPearls Before Swine comic strips and poorly conceived, clearly dated pop culture references circa 1999.  Yet, in the last 12 months, I have left an organization (and, in my ways, a profession) that I had differences with, joined the ranks of two more, and found myself grappling with bureaucracy of every shape and size in a city that is far less post-racial American that I had originally imagined.  In many ways, the idealistic teacher-to-be has hardened to the reality of world that will change for only a few things: catastrophe, status, money, sex, and sweet, sweet candy.  I am still hopeful and idealistic, but cautiously so.

The last year has been a test to my disposition and, to be honest, it has a test of rotating-imaginary-shapes-and-calculating-the-area-of-certain-slices-of-said-shapes-on-the-AP-Calculus-BC-exam proportions (in other words, epic proportions).  I have come face to face with my limitations.  I cannot depend on caffeinated drinks, youth, and all-nighters in a full-time working world.  I cannot wait for a summer break to sustain my efforts.  I cannot expect to appease everyone in my life without it taking a toll on myself.  I cannot find all the answers.  I cannot take on the burden of the world (or the community or even my family) and place it on my shoulders.  I cannot drink two glasses of wine after a day of work and not expect to fall asleep, in the fetal position, on my roommates’ bed.  It has been a rewarding, tumultuous, difficult, beautiful, ridiculous 12 months and truth of any kind is still very much elusive.  Perhaps the difference 12 months can make is that this reality no longer bothers me.  So this is adulthood.

The wide-eyed girl who sat in the airport a year ago writing a letter to 36, chatted face to face, one year later, with the intended recipients bearing a look of fatigue and uncertainty.  For a year, I held onto the idea that I could sustain the romantic notions of the world I had built in college in this “real world”.  I don’t think I can save the world, but I no longer believe the world is mine to be saved – or that I have the knowledge or authority to lay claim to the saving.

Yet, the tidbits of advice I have received from older colleagues leave me hopeful and yes, still idealistic.  Find things that are meaningful, foster the relationships you have, travel often, seek adventure, learn, continue working (hard) for worthwhile causes, find time to write pretentious things like this entry (I mean, did I really just write that “truth of any kind if still very much elusive?”  Who the fuck am I, Jewel?).  As decisions in the next week or so determine where I go next (professionally – geographically, I have finally found a city I want to commit to), the context – all the intangible things I mentioned – in which I make my decision will factor in far more than the standards I held by in college (prestige, expectation, obligation, world-saving).

What a (welcomed) difference a year makes.

I am wanting to be a writer.

For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to be a writer.

I wanted it so badly that I wrote about being a writer.  I told other writers to write about my wanting to be a writer.  I convinced myself that now that said writer has written about my wanting to be a writer, I should go forth and write so that the writing of my becoming a writer would be not be rendered fiction.

In fact, when I graduated, my high school newspaper, the equivalent of a poorly constructed ink blot, profiled its top graduates.  Per the stereotype of immigrant communities who deeply care about their not living in a cardboard box, everyone wanted to be a doctor, an engineer, or a pharmacist.  This girl looked at the profile writer and told her to write about my being a writer.  I wanted to write films.  I wanted to write books.  I wanted to write articles.  I wanted to be the Vietnamese American version of Martin Scorsese, Amy Tan, and Katie Couric — except far less Catholic and questionably obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio, Asian and incapable of making metaphors to anything aside dragons, and irritating to the point of aneurysm.  And since no one knew what and where the hell a Georgetown University was, no one saw the irony in all of it.  Not even me.  Well, except my parents who told everyone that I wanted to go to law school and become, essentially, the Governor of Texas.

The writing life that I had dreamed, written, and asked other people to write about on my behalf was given to me in the form of my senior year.  I had proposed and was granted an entire year to eat, sleep, think, and shit writing in the form of a thesis.  And that I did, every day, for an entire academic year — and experienced the life of a self-important, unnecessarily tortured, highly caffeinated to the point of neuroses wordsmith.  It was, apparently, exactly what I wanted.

My entire life was scheduled around the construction of sentences.  On Mondays, I would walk to the Starbucks a few blocks away from my apartment and sit on the second floor with my standard glass of iced, black coffee with a shot of, “woe is me, I am an artist” espresso.  On a good Monday, I would produce two paragraphs worth of useable prose, to be cleaned by my life mentor/thesis advisor.  I would walk into my living room, glowing as if I had cured fucking cancer, and inform my roommates, that I had constructed 15 adequate sentences.  My roommates, all of whom were resolving African famine and war in their respective research papers, would look at me as if I were bat shit crazy.

On a bad Monday, I would feel compelled to write a poorly constructed letter to the Starbucks Corporation informing them that their adult contemporary rotation was God awful bullshit and that their repertoire (and my soul) could highly benefit from the musical styling’s of Mariah Carey circa “Always Be My Baby.”  I would leave the second floor, high strung from no-prose-progress, and would walk into my living room and play “Always Be My Baby.”  The world of writing, it seemed, was one of exceedingly high highs and insanely low lows.

I saw the world in writing — a world of heightened senses and an attention to peculiarities.  Mid-project, I experienced, processed, and saw everything in prose — when a leaf fell from a tree, I extrapolated some ridiculous life metaphor from it, immediately translated the appearance of the leaf into a series of adjective ridden, multiple clause descriptions.  The color, the shadow, the sway and swing of its fall, the way it looked in comparison to the backdrop (and its respective hue).  It was, by far, the most pretentious period of my life, yet the world is more beautiful when experience is liquidated into prose (as opposed to tripping on a pile of leaves and thinking, “God damn it, nature.  God damn it.”)

I cared, perhaps far too much.  I once sat with my thesis advisor for an hour and a half, thumbing through various hard covered references for the sake of rearranging the words of one sentence.  I would spend hours ignoring the reality around me because I was entirely in my head, reconstructing memories, envisioning the taste, the scent, and the noise of the truth I had supposedly witnessed and felt compelled to relay.  This was, perhaps, my biggest struggle — I thought so much of the past in my writing life, yet was attempting to balance it with forward thinking, future driven timeline of social justice work.  I was never in one temporal space.

It mattered so much that I hardly ate.  It mattered so much that I rarely ever slept, at least soundly.  It mattered so much that the off-white color of the library walls had a healthier, more radiant glow than I did.  It mattered so much that it has taken an entire year to recover.  But today, I sat down and I had an idea.

I think I am ready to write again.  After all, this writer is writing about my wanting to write.  I might as well.