Writing My Way Forward and Through

The only thing that works for me.

My second-grade teacher told my mother I was good at creative writing. Encourage her to keep doing it, she told my mom. My mom remembered this when I was well into my adult life. In fact, my kids were beyond second grade when she finally shared that.

I found my second-grade report card. My mom was right.

In high school, when I got the same scores on my SATs, fairly high, in both the math and verbal sections, only the math button went off in my father’s head. He proudly escorted me to college as a chemical engineering major.

As a “Chem E”, I started to pine for reading and writing. After my first year, I had no room for electives, considering the curriculum required 4 Calculus courses, 5 Chemistry, 2 Physics, and the rest (it felt like 100), engineering.

After a life-threatening traumatic brain injury the summer before my junior year, from which I bounced back surprisingly well in academics, but not so well in relationships and expressing myself to others, I gravitated towards reading and especially writing to heal. Math and science weren’t enough.

I added Sociology as a double major by entering the Five-Year Liberal Arts and Engineering Program at my school.

In my final year, I conducted a research project and wrote a comprehensive report to support establishing a women’s center (student services) and a race and gender center (academic), both of which still exist.

In so doing, I embraced feminism, an intense desire to fight racism and homophobia, and the fact that I wanted to do more than solve differential equations and run a distillation column in a refinery.

I got married, moved to California, and got a job as a research analyst, using my technical background. Then I had a daughter and decided to stay home with her. I needed intellectual stimulation.

I read a lot. I wrote outlines of what I was reading. I made lists of ideas. I wanted to write a book one day.

I kept trying to start a daily journal but couldn’t stick with it. That had been happening to me since I was a kid. (I have a box of journals from random phases in my life. I really need to throw them out.)

Related posts:

It is so easy to think of Affiliate Marketing as being a difficult thing to do when actually it is easy but there are a few things one needs to keep in mind. So many people almost shudder when you…

She had stared at the blank page for days. She had clicked refresh on Gmail one hundred times. Then Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. She had even downloaded SnapChat although she didn’t know how to use…

The idea for this app was born out of pure laziness and forgetfulness. I’d had a recurring problem with our Slack channel #worktime. I kept forgetting to use it… The idea behind it is to notify…