Hiking Off-Trail
If you’ve ever hiked off-trail for an extended period of time, you’ll experience that your surroundings will begin to blend together. If you were to turn around and attempt to hike back in the same direction that you came from, you would not end up in the same spot that you stood just three hours earlier. Without any trail markers to guide you, you walk a path that no one has walked before, and that you will never return to walk again.
Life is a lot like that long hike. The more distance you have traveled, the foggier your memory becomes when you try to move backwards and remember the unmarked steps you once took. In my life, writing has acted as a trail marker of sorts. It is a flag that I firmly stick into the ground, reminding myself that I once stood here. That this was once me.
As I perform written reflection, I capture my thoughts and emotions, I untangle my past experiences, and I discover myself even just a little bit more. With that written reflection as an artifact, I am able to return to it at any point in time and compare those thoughts and emotions to those I currently hold. This second reflection does not taint the authenticity of the original reflection, rather it allows me to adapt with it. With writing as an artifact, I don’t run the risk of misremembering myself with my current biases. I can judge myself from the standpoint of my current biases. But that original writing keeps the old me frozen in time.
While it is impossible to write at every moment in time – to relentlessly catch every raw thought and emotion – the more often we write, the more truthful is the self-identity that we are able to capture. Frequently, our written reflection is not raw, but rather a reflection on the past. This does not necessarily imply a loss in value, as often when we are caught in a moment of raw emotion, we are incapable processing it in a meaningful way. But the more often we write and reflect, the more able we are to create a meaningful trail marker.
As I look back at my writing throughout the years, I see a trail marker on both where I stood as a writer and where I stood as a person. As a writer – my use of vocabulary, my employed writing techniques, my overall sophistication of prose. As a person – my beliefs, my actions, my attitudes, my passions, my thoughts, my heart.
***
I think that the most important lesson I learned in college with regards to writing was this: I am a writer.
To me, being a writer does not mean reaching some indeterminate standard of writing. Rather, it is the knowledge that writing is a part of me. Like a painter connects with their most inner workings through painting, as a writer, I connect with my greatest depths through writing.
With this realization of a part of my identity, I learned that if I want to leave a trail marker – write. If I want to understand who I am in this moment – write. If I want to be able to look back at who I once was in this moment – write.
However, this lesson was not learned overnight. Many hundreds (even thousands) of pages I had written, before I ever began to consider myself a writer.
***
In middle school, high school, and even my first semester of college, writing was about responding to a prompt: “Select one Trojan character from the Iliad and discuss what this character shows about how the Iliad portrays the enemy.” Or, “Should The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn be censored and all 200 uses of the n-word taken out? What would be gained and what would be lost?” I would read these prompts and within minutes start writing my paper. I would pick an approach and then skim back through the book to find quotes that would support my argument, ignoring contradictory evidence along the way. My thought process surrounding my writing was superficial and I would hammer out within a few hours’ time, what was nonetheless considered, an A-level paper.
It was not until my sophomore year of college, in an academic argumentation course on slavery, that my method of writing began to change. The assignments in this class were different than those I had experienced before. They weren’t handcuffed to a book we had read, they were open to all the nuances of real life. The prompts were always thought-provoking and so I sought to make my responses thought-provoking as well. I was invested in the topic and so I invested in my answer.
Unlike in high school, where I would begin to write immediately after reading the prompt, thinking began to consume the first few hours of my writing process. Long before I would start to click away on my keyboard, I would brainstorm. I would come up with elaborate essay ideas, and then turn to my roommates or call my mom, and spend hours debating my ideas, finding the holes in my argument, patching them up, failing to patch them up, moving on to my next idea, twisting and developing my next idea to make it more powerful, and finally achieving the excitement of having a wonderfully thought out concept for an intriguing essay.
Only then did I start to write.
Only then did I start to truly write.
***
The last assignment in my academic argumentation course, was to write a thank you letter, which I decided to address to my mom. Once I began to write, I couldn’t stop. I labored away on it during tedious lectures, I neglected my other homework, and I stayed up late at night in order to keep writing. There was so much I wanted to convey, and I cherished this opportunity to convey it in writing. I wanted my mom to be able to save my words and hold onto them whenever they were needed. There was no one grading this assignment, yet I found myself editing it even more meticulously than papers that counted for 40% of my grade. I wanted each sentence to sound beautiful. I knew this would be a letter that both my mom and I would turn back to when we needed it. I knew that it would stand as a trail marker in both of our lives. So I wanted it to be flawless. The meaning mattered most, but the art of how I wrote it mattered too.
***
It was after that academic argumentation course that I decided to pursue a minor in writing. Where many of my business classes left me feeling weary, that class was where I went to re-charge my battery to carry me through the rest of the week feeling inspired and motivated. I loved writing that was geared towards saying something meaningful rather than just saying something. More than that, I wanted to be able to say something meaningful in a beautiful way. Just like a painter strives to make a painting that conveys meaning while being aesthetically pleasing, I was confident that my writing would have meaning, but I wanted to advance the aesthetics of my writing. I knew there were things I wanted to say, and I wanted to continue to improve my writing, so I could say them in a beautiful way.
***
I was excited to be accepted into the minor in writing program, but did not yet consider myself to be a writer. Being a writer wasn’t a goal that I sought after either, it was just something I hadn’t given any thought to.
Once we started the writing minor gateway course, I noticed that the professor would refer to us as writers, but I thought it was endearing, not true. That label was for people who wrote stuff that could be found on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. That wasn’t me.
It wasn’t until working on my “Why I Write” essay that my perception changed. Suddenly, entire class discussions focused on our motivations for writing. “Why do you write, Nina?”
The more I wrote on why I write, the more I realized that writing is a part of me. Writing is more than just an interest, it is part of my identity.
And so I decided: I am a writer.
***
With my newfound identity as a writer, I did what I had seldom done before – I shared my writing. First, I volunteered to have my essay work-shopped in class. For my re-purposing project, I had taken my Humans of Ethiopia project and turned it into a personal travel essay. Humans of Ethiopia (inspired by Humans of New York) is a project I started during my time in Ethiopia. I photographed the people I encountered during my travels and shared their thoughts and stories. When re-purposing my photos and their captions into an essay, my hope was to weave together the story that connected each of the photos. I wanted to tell the overarching story that Humans of Ethiopia hadn’t been able to convey.
My favorite story within the essay was about a playful sixteen-year-old boy named Henok, whom I love dearly. Henok tragically lost both of his parents to AIDS and too suffers from AIDS. In this excerpt, I describe how it was late at night and Henok was escorting me back to the bed and breakfast where I was staying:
“When we got to the main road, the street was lined with prostitutes awaiting their next customers. As we walked past, Henok approached one of them, offering her some of his popcorn. The prostitute looked back at him, eyebrows raised, skeptical of this little kid with the silly bands and the sweet smile. He stretched out his arm, waving the bag of popcorn towards her, tempting her to take.
She reached her hand into the bag of popcorn, coming out with a handful and a flicker of a smile across her lips. Henok went from one prostitute to the next, sharing his snack. There was something so poetic, so simple, but so unbelievably beautiful, about the innocent boy with AIDS sharing his bag of popcorn with the “whores” of Addis Ababa. Both victims in their own right, but each viewed so differently by society. I had witnessed an act so incredibly human. An act to restore faith in humanity. And yet, without another word, we just continued walking.”
As I read that part of the story in class, one of my peers shared that she had goose bumps running up her arm. I had always cherished that moment and it was reinvigorating to discover that others found it to be impactful as well. I was passionate about my time in Ethiopia and so sharing my essay with the class, receiving their feedback, and hearing how the story struck them, was a powerful experience for me.
A few months later, I shared my entire writing portfolio on social media, with the Humans of Ethiopia essay as the centerpiece. Again, the experience of sharing my writing was incredible. People whom I never imagined would take the time to read such an essay, were approaching me and sharing their thoughts. Discussing my writing brought the experiences alive again for me. It gave those Ethiopians who held a special place in my heart, a new place in my world in America. Somehow, my experiences became more solidified in my own mind through the process of writing them and sharing them. I embraced my identity as a writer and allowed others to find my trail marker in the midst of the woods, in order to see what I had once seen, and be struck by what had struck me.
***
The next semester, I took a class where the essay assignment was to “make the private public.” That didn’t mean putting up posters of our darkest, deepest secrets, but rather, “public” meant sharing a personal essay with the class.
The professor fostered an exceptionally safe classroom environment and he would encourage his students to form relationships outside of the classroom. It happened naturally – after all – we knew far more about each other than some of our closest friends at school. We would have pot luck dinners, wine and cheese nights, and philosophical coffee chats. My class became my family. And that was exactly what I had been hoping for.
I took the class, knowing its reputation for being a place where secrets were safe, because I had a secret that I needed to share. Having grown into my identity as a writer, I knew that for me to heal, I needed to write, and I needed to solidify my writing by having it read by others, by encouraging it to be discussed, by having my experiences acknowledged and my thoughts valued.
I worked the entire semester, writing a paper that made me weep. That scratched at wounds that had not yet even begun to heal. But I loved every second of writing that paper. I needed to write that paper.
***
I fear forgetting. Who am I if I can’t remember who I was? I fear any part of me slipping past my grasp. Some people want to forget the hardships they have suffered through. I want to remember. I need to remember.
Pain is the hardest feeling to hold onto. When you get a paper-cut, one day passes, and you can’t remember what it felt like to have that paper cut you a day earlier. Leaving trail markers, writing, is the only way I know how to make sure I don’t forget.
It’s not that I’m a masochist. I don’t enjoy pain. But when I go through hardships I feel my body working to erase my memory. And that scares me. I don’t know who I would be if I forgot. So I write.
I experience the same process with inspiration. Inspiration is such a hard emotion to hold onto. That initial fire that lights within you is powerful enough to make anything happen. But it so easily fades. I fear that inspiration fading. So I write. When Ethiopia feels a world away, all I have to do is turn back to my essay, and I can find me there.
***
As I look back at my writing throughout the years, I see a trail marker on both where I stood as a writer and where I stood as a person. Through my written reflection, I am able to better understand what makes me me. My identity as a writer empowers me to engage with the other facets of my identity. Because of this, I will continue to write so that I never lose myself. So that there is a place where I can always go to find my heart.