By Kaitlyn Lange
Imagine you’re 6 years old, and this world is yours. Pieces of chalk litter the sidewalk, and your friend’s laugh echoes across the neighborhood. Everything is perfect. You’re chasing your dog down the street when your foot suddenly catches, and you end up sprawled out in the gravel. You’re in pain, so you begin to cry. Emotions flow freely and nothing has made you question the connection between your feelings and reactions; if you feel something, you feel it with no remorse. Now, you’re in middle school submitting your first ever 5 paragraph essay. Your topic is picked by the teacher, and there’s a strict set of guidelines that follow. Your class pumps out 15 essays written by 15 different individuals that all sound a bit too similar. Cramming for the word count, you pick and choose what adjectives make the cut. Suddenly, your paper lacks your “style” and simply follows the teacher’s criteria, as it will for the next 6 years of your life.
As adults with more creative freedom, this is our chance to take back our writing. However, this is also when it becomes scary. When is too much, too much? And when is too little, too little?
In a 2006 TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson said, “We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it”, and Peter Smagorinsky, from the University of Georgia, submitted to Writers Who Care, “…emotions are foundational to writing, and I’d add, to living life. You’d never know it, however, from the ways in which schools view writing as a form of “cold cognition”: purely analytic reasoning, unadulterated by underlying feelings, which are believed in the context of school to be illogical and inappropriate. The analysis of the most moving of literature must itself be dry as a bone, with students often forbidden from using “I” to express their interpretations, as if their papers are written by an “objective” observer….who doesn’t care at all.”
Following the thoughts of these two men, write what you feel needs to be said, and make it yours. Submit that poem you have been worried about others seeing, and include your frivolous adjectives. If it feels like too much, step back and review it, and if it feels like too little, then add to it. Just write for yourself, and if it does not make the cut, at least you can be content knowing you stayed true to yourself instead of spitting out a piece that one universal system has tried to convince you feels like you.