Blog 5

Writing was fun for me when I was younger. It was just like playing barbies, I could express myself behind something; I hid behind the barbies and with writing I hid behind the pencil. These feelings came to me during the time that I heard of different "cultural stories". My dad told me about how he is the "american dream". He was raised in Puerto Rico, grew up very poor, came to America with little money, went to college and became a successful engineer. He would tell me "you could be anything you want to be". Coming from his mouth it meant alot. My writing would be all over the place because I was under the impression that I could be who ever I wanted to be and if that was a "writer" at the moment then so it was. As soon as I was taught how to put sentences together in first and second grade I began to make short stories for my entertainment at home.One of my first short stories was a story of a girl’s life. I wrote one or two sentences on each page an majority of the story was illustrated through drawings.
Furthermore, my earliest memories of reading books were with the themes about "being anything you wanted to be". I also read "rags to riches" stories which correlated with that theme. One of the stories that sticks out the most was the Cinderella story. She lost her father, was treated horribly by her step mother, and one day all of that changed and she became a princess and lived happily ever after. The idea of becoming something instantly was the theme that played in my head when I was younger so my dreams were endless. Madonna was a huge influence on the way I wrote as a child to. Her idea of "express yourself" "be who you want to be" made me feel that there wouldn't be any critiques in writing because people like those who express themselves.

As soon as I got into fourth grade and really started to get my writing read through school reports, I realized writing wasn't as I believed it to be. As the essay written by Dr. Chandler said, some of these myths are seen as "the way it is" and before teachers actually critiqued my work I believed that "expressing myself" truly was great and had no consequences. Nevertheless, they did and those consequences were people's criticzims. Some of the criticzims were that my writing didn't make sense, that my grammar was horrible, and that my thoughts weren't organized. I struggled with the idea that I wasn't a good writer for years when this happened. What made it harder for me was when I started letting my mother proof read my reports. She would critique the whole entire paper without any positive feedback. This made me shift my ideas of writing as "a boring thought out process" instead of it being a fun way to "express yourself".

I also started to relate writing with school which meant it wasn’t fun. Everytime I had to write a sentence or two to anyone that was non-related to school I would take forever to put it together as if it was going to be handed in for a grade. I would read it to myself alot of times and come up with some reason to change what I wrote around. Furthermore, the more I started to dislike anything with writing the more I avoided it. This included me reading books. I spent more time watching TV then putting my time into a great novel.
At this point in my life I started to feel the pressures of “the real world” which was that hard work paid off but for me my idea of “being who I wanted to be” still stuck to me. I knew that my fathers influence on what he taught me when I was younger was important. What was missing in the things that my father taught me? I then realized what was missing was me working hard for what I wanted to accomplish. My father didn’t tell me stories about how hard he worked to get were he was and the fairy tale stories I read when I was younger spoke nothing about working hard either. I realized I valued success in life but inorder to do that I had to improve myself which meant takeing constructive critizicm as a tool for improvement not failure.
When I accepted the idea of “working hard” I was already in my teens. Writing improved a little bit but the way I felt about writing shifted again. I started to enjoy writing as a pass time. The internet definitly encouraged this shift. During my first experience with writing on the internet I would send emails to the boys I liked. This made it much easier to say how I felt since I could hide behind something plus the message got there fast. This then grew into me wanting to write poems to express how I felt about others.