Why I Write
When I was in junior high, one of the requirements of our English class was that we keep a journal. We could write whatever we wanted, but had to have a certain number on entries per week to make the grade. The promise was that the teacher may read our entries, but keep a hands off kind of perspective and not harass us about content, sentence structure and the like. The object was just to get words on the page. There were several kids that struggled to meet the bare minimum requirement, but not me. In this assignment, I found something that I loved to do.
Junior high was a very dark time of my life. I was lonely and friendless and kids at that age are very cruel. Even though I was not always the object of the teasing and scorn, I had to try very hard to blend in and not make waves. I found a release in writing. I wasn’t judged, I could write whatever I want without fear of being laughed at or mocked.
And so I wrote lots of stuff. You know, the normal, stupid stuff that junior high kids write about. I made up stories, ridiculous stories. In fact, the more ridiculous the better. I wrote about feelings, about considering suicide, although that was during the darkest times.
And when the assignment was over, I kept on writing different things, always looking for the opportunity. In my hometown, our local paper had a weekly column written by one of the seniors in high school. I dated the younger sister of the columnist my sophomore year and heard about how it worked second hand. When I was a junior, I submitted an application to write the column the next year. I think I had to write a sample column and go to an interview. I think I bombed, and as I look back I’m embarrassed at how young and immature I was at the time. I can just picture my interviewer getting done with me and going, “Uhh, No!” and throwing me on the reject pile.
I didn’t get the column job (which turned out to be a blessing), and found that my interests lay in the math and science direction. High school wasn’t the nightmare of junior high, and I found less need and time to write. The stuff I did write were the required essays for English, which were difficult and painful and I struggled through every word. I was enjoying calculus and physics and chemistry and buried this desire.
By the time I went college, I had disavowed writing altogether. After finishing the one required English class, I was relieve to be taking classes like Statics, Fields, Differential Equations, and FORTRAN. It was all black and white, right or wrong, nothing subjective.
I graduated, got married, started an engineering job, and for the longest time, the only thing that I wrote was in my prayer journal to God. And that was enough.
A couple of years ago the blogging craze started and I ignored it until World Magazine started writing a column about what was going around the blogosphere. I started visiting their blog and reading it, and as I searched further I found more and more people out there online. There were a lot that I liked and some I didn’t, but mostly a bunch of different people in different parts of the world that were writing about their lives. It was a new concept of posting it on the web and I liked the idea of these short snippets of life. So I started a blog, that started out as “Tech Expression”, but morphed into “Not (quite) Balenced“.
I started getting regular readers and commenters. I became obsessed with it and felt that I needed to post more and more. I was spending too much time on this and felt like God told me to pull the plug. And so reluctantly I did…and then started it up again…and then pulled the plug again. I stopped responding to comments. What few readers I had, evaporated. The pressure to perform was too much and to addicting for me.
And now I’ve moved over to a little unknown part of the web, hiding in the shadows, and I write for myself. I write because I get these ideas in my head that won’t go away. I write because there are some things I’ve just got to say or I’ll explode. I write to glorify God and to remember out loud what He has done for me and in my life. I want to be real. I want to be Truefaced. I want to be understood.
And there is still part of me that wants to be that high school newspaper columnist.
