School and Mental/Physical Health

I'm so lucky. I get to go to a great magnet school where I learn a lot and get hands on experience with my art. Unfortunately, my physical and mental health cause me to become very ill and I miss a lot of school. This is something I wish I could stop, but undortinarelt, no matter how many diagnoses I get and how hard I try I never really get all the way better. Recently, this has been a very difficult issue and caused me a lot of hardship with keeping up with school.

I really wish that this was something that people understood more in terms of school. My friends think I skip just because I don't want to go. I literally hate being at my house but if i'm exhausted all the time, depressed and scared, and have migraines that make me unable to get through daily life I would hope people would understand.

A lot of teachers don't get this either. They assume that because I'm a senior I'm just skipping. I know it's as hard as them for me to miss as it is for me, so I just wish it was more understood. I wish society understood health issues and such more. It's very debilitating to try to get through the day. After school I always feel very sick and get nothing done, I can only concentrate at school.

I wish that people weren't penalized so much for their absences in a world that claims to be accomadating. The reality is you can be suspended for absences, and that makes no sense. I wish the attitude toward mental and physical illnesses that can't be seen weren't that people are lazy or that they can just deal with it. I wish it was just more understood and maybe it would help mentally ill or physically ill people to do better in school. There just doesn't seem to be much accomidation for people who aren't neurotypical. I really hope this stigma changes.

Writer's Fest 2016-Breaking Into My Identity

Franny Choi and I at Douglas Anderson Writer's Fest 2016

Today was my last writer’s fest of my high school career, and it feels as though time is simply slipping away and I still do not know who I am, but I have much more of an idea of what I want to be doing as a writer, even if that idea is beyond unrealistic.

This was my second writer’s fest, and I simply expected it to be like the time before. I love the idea, the thought of writers coming together to teach each other tricks of the trade, and to bet on who’s worthy enough to spend thirty grand on to fly in and out for a day.

The writers this year were all so star studded, seemingly everyone was a fangirl of at least one of them, and I took comfort in having teachers to help me gather information on them before being thrown out into a frenzy of workshop choices and filled rooms. Harrison Scott Key was so funny that his workshop was a stand only one.

But the day was long. A 12 hour or more day for writers just isn’t too realistic to create fantastic material, but appreciated nonetheless. I can hardly get through an hour and a half during my school week. And I stayed behind for a workshop that was cancelled due to flight delays. Unfortunately, I may have also chosen the worst workshops for me, and I really hope I’ll get a chance to see some of these authors again. Some people pushed me to see authors I wasn’t really sure I would enjoy, but perhaps one of them will be my teacher in the future. There is something that I learned through this. Just because someone might enjoy something, doesn’t mean you will.

I think that the event for me this year was a lot about finding my own identity in my writing rather than talking about craft. I feel as though I am always writing for other people, other groups, other people’s oppression, the often difficult trials that a character might face, and nothing of my personal life. I am far too private to be a writer, and it is occurring to me that I am simply scared, a coward in my shell of a body, so stuck in my mind but so unwilling to break out of it. In fact, when I went up to the table to have my books signed by the headlining authors Richard Blanco and Ron Carlson, I was so baffled that after so much practicing in my head, the words didn’t flow the way I wanted them too. This is partially why i’m a writer, and also evidence that I need to learn more on my voice in writing. It’s like i’ve got this idea in my head of what’s cliche and immature to write about, been limited from topics like death and love, and yet I know what I can write and I still limit myself. I need to break out of that shell of comfort and rules, something my teacher told me this year.

But back to identity. In Franny Choi’s workshop on the identity of yourself as a writer and a poet, I was very unsurprised that with my father sitting next to me, I was unwilling to expose certain parts of my identity, and had to compromise it for the sake of the workshop, suffering in my writing so that I didn’t reveal too much about myself. I am so scared to have someone analyze me or judge me beyond the ways I’ve been judged before. I also noticed that I am too scared to share on here, this blog with so few hits, the topic I was so good with writing about, but so reluctant to share. I like to believe that there are some things worth hiding, that telling all is a bit too cliche and millennial, but I know that I am suffering for it. I press on day after day hiding and forcing down an identity of mne that is so taboo in this age, something that is so unheard of and awkward to speak about. I’ll probably continue to be so afraid of myself and my realities that I suppress these parts of myself regardless. Eventually, I hope to become someone that I know can please all sides of a crowd, someone less boring, less strange. Someone who has more to them than that one hidden identity, someone who isn’t a coward. I want to fulfill my dreams, not just deal with them, and I want them to live in me, I want to live my identity, not compromise myself for the sake of family, writing, peers, or to avoid taboos and cliches. In this day and age, it seems like every real world problem is a cliche, so I may as well live mine.