It may have been an expectation that I would start out with the question “Why do I write?”, but I’m not the clichéy (invented word) type of guy. For better or for worse, I do my best to disagree with everybody, not to be a jerk, but to challenge common beliefs and ideas that “everyone knows to be true”. Yet, society does not allow such a person to go unchecked, so most of the time; I am forced to put down my rants, thoughts, and ideas on paper.

I write to think. To think isn’t merely a sequence of thoughts that move in chronological order; it is an unsequenced series of ideas that come to form a big picture. Although I am not very good at doing it, I try to bring a small notebook to record the details of my everyday life: how someone walks, how the hand moves when a teacher talks, or how often some student walks along a path. I’m not being a stalker, I am merely trying to find realistic activities that everyone sees, but ignores, and attempt to put it into my writing. On paper, it is so much easier to pick apart and analyze the extremely confusing and complicated world around me, making it that much more bearable.

Bearable. I have long stories to go with that, and how it ties in with my writing. The rebellious ideas I possessed made grade school teachers resent my presence. Often, my hand would shoot up in the middle of a lecture, and ask a question that the teacher was unable to answer. I thought I was being smart; my teachers just thought I was an annoying brat. It was only after several detentions and talks with my English teacher, I learned to keep silent. Yet, every day I would go home, take out a piece of paper, and write down all the things I thought were wrong about class, and then throw the paper away. In a sense, my writing was also a way to take out my anger at the world; my virtual punching bag that never breaks.

Fortunately, I met a benevolent literature teacher who understood my ideas in the fifth grade. By this time, I had made a solid decision to pursue literature, and it was that teacher who caught me writing one day by myself on the picnic tables. Aware of my ideas, she proceeded not to forbid me to think such thoughts; rather she offered to read and correct my work. From that point on, I wrote to show; to show the world our problems, our solutions, our cause and effect, our misgivings and our certainty. I write because I feel the duty to enlighten our citizens, because truly, there is always good in everyone. They just need to find it, and write to help them find that goodness.

Since the beginning of my freshman year, I’ve had teachers who encouraged and helped me with my work, further increasing my lust for writing. Thus, poems and short articles on my life and thoughts have started to fill up space on my computer. While “expressing oneself” may be an overused reason for any form of art, I still feel that it is essential to my amateur writing career. I find that writing can show feelings and emotions that would generally be considered unacceptable in society. I find that writing can hide much more meaning than spoken words could ever have. But most importantly, I find that writing is the thing that shows who I am the most.