Finding a Story to Tell

Despite my aversion to talking more about myself, I have always had a love for storytelling. As a child, I distinctly remember my second-grade teacher telling the class that books are a form of escape. That there is the ability to jump into a new world with new possibilities. While my teacher had said these things while showing us a children’s book about the jungle, that idea of escapism stuck with me. With that, I had become a child transfixed on books and creating my own stories to be immersed in. Somehow it felt destined to become an English major, learning how to tell stories and pick them apart.

Throughout my college education, I have found myself questioning how I got to where I am. While I did have interests in studying humanities (such as art, history, and even classics), the few classes that I did take in those subjects didn’t challenge me in the way that tickled my brain. The reports I would make for those kinds of courses didn’t feel as flexible—and while that could have been my instructors for those classes, I just never found my way to declaring a minor or even thinking about changing my major. Even when I decided to transfer over to the College of Charleston, I was set on the English major with a concentration in Literature, Film, and Cultural Studies.

I will say a part of my college experience is filled with some sort of regret of not being more involved academically, socially, or in whatever the usual college activities may be. It has been only in my last year (or even last semester) of college can make peace with those regrets and focus on the stuff that I have done—the ones that brought me back to that second-grade self filled with wonder about storytelling. I’ve been able to take my present time as a sort of enjoyment, as seen in Ross Gay’s “Book of Delights”. The preface of the book explains how after finding the discipline in such an exercise, his delight in life grew: “I felt my life to be more full of delight,” he tells us. “Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight.” That note had felt like a reflection to how much I had gone through to build my mental health up to where it is today. Beginning with small things, I found comfort in trying to accomplish tasks inside and outside of school—becoming a rather peaceful version of myself (we’ll skip all the dark stuff).

That kind of attunement to my surroundings is something that I’ve found myself constantly working on as a creative writer in college. Creative writing was something I delighted in throughout my childhood and found it equally challenging to find my own style—or even play around with different forms of storytelling. My first creative writing class was something that allowed me to truly feel confident in the work I was creating. Not that my stories were perfect—far from it–but the ability to create, is something I had always strived for.

If I were to take one thing away from my college experience it would be that everybody has a story to tell, and I want to hear them all. In the strange way that I go about life, I’ve loved comparing things to art and literature (something I joke about how I use my degree). In a fantastic article by Paula L. Moya, she writes, “A close reading of a work of literature—as with a film, a painting, or a piece of music—can thus serve as an excavation of, and a meditation on, the pervasive sociocultural ideas of the social worlds, as well as the worlds of sense, within both authors and readers live”. This was something I had always thought about, regardless of not knowing how to rightly describe it, I think it is what drew me to pursue an English degree.

And regardless of the mushy narrative where I find beauty in everything—yada yada ya–there is the cynical part of me that peaks through in all of this. While it is tough telling the kid version of yourself that “hey you’re not going to be that Oscar-winning director/screenwriter before you turn twenty-five,” I learned that it’s going to be alright. I feel at ease in knowing that I studied something I have a passion for. In the rough spell that I’ve spent the first three years of college, I can now safely say that there is smooth sailing ahead. Through trial and error, I’ve come back to that awestruck second-grader who was enchanted by books and the stories they told.