On Writing: September 8th, 2022

Before I remember wanting anything else, I wanted to be a writer: writing has long been a way for me to make sense of my world. At age five, when it was time to start school, I hand-penned and illustrated a book about - you guessed it - starting kindergarten. The waxy crayons I used stuck in places along the coloured construction paper, depositing unsightly oblong nubs of intense blacks and reds in the middle of my pictures; yet I was satisfied. In the world I created, if you followed the rules, you would learn to read, write and have fun. It was so much more simple than in real-life kindergarten where, as it turned out, sometimes there was no room me, which was not fun at all. In my book, I was a perfect student. In real life, I disobeyed my own written admonishment to listen to the teacher, shoved my Erin popsicle stick into the already-full Indoor Playground pocket of the class Activity Choices, and went to join my friends on the climbing structure. The real world might be dark and edgy, but in the act of writing, I could create order from chaos. And I could always be the hero.

It wasn’t until the summer before grade five that I finally learned there were other ways to tell my story. After attending overnight camp in July, I decided to write a novel about a girl at summer camp, basing this loosely (by which I mean pretty much exactly) on my own experiences. Except, of course, the hero in my book was an exemplary camper who never refused to get in the lake for swimming lessons, did not shout in frustration at her cabin-mate for spilling the hot chocolate pitcher at breakfast, was never homesick, and was loved above all others by her counsellors. Oh, and of course, this hero definitely never experienced the disgust of finding a very large and very dead spider at the bottom of her cup at lunch, nor did she have to keep this shameful secret for the rest of the summer, lest someone tease her mercilessly for drinking literal bug juice.

Cabin G6, Camp Timberlane, July 1987. I'm seated front row left, wearing a Blue Jays hat. I swear I don't remember which one of these girls spilled hot chocolate on me.

I think I was well-enough liked at camp, and I truly did enjoy my time there, dead spiders and impetigo (yup) notwithstanding. But I had thought that my story could be improved upon, that I could be improved upon, by removing all these inconvenient moments of human frailty; instead, I realized that this was precisely what made things interesting. As I re-read my idealized version of the scene in the Mess Hall, the one where I did not yelp loudly in embarrassment as a large brown patch of spilled hot chocolate bloomed outward from my crotch, I knew it was time to stop revising my past. I didn’t identify with this beatific, false version of myself, and I certainly didn’t care to root for her. And so, at the age of ten, I literally and metaphorically closed that chapter of my life, although it would take many more years before I would learn to be truly vulnerable in my writing.

I wrote regularly and seriously throughout middle school, high school, and even university, but took a very, very long hiatus from creative writing after my admission to medical school. Medicine offered an abundance of fresh material, but deprived me of the free time to sit with my thoughts until they distilled down to their elements, which I could then construct into the words that helped me order my world. Without writing, it felt sometimes like I had experienced only the most general sense of some critical event, processing its colour and form as though through frosted glass, missing the sharp details. I had always come to writing from a very spontaneous place, and this did not serve me well in my busy new life, which soon grew to include a husband, three children and a growing medical practice, all while navigating MS.

It’s not surprising, then, that it took a medical leave of absence, with the attendant time in the company of only my thoughts, to finally return to writing. I started with journaling as a way to metabolize my complicated feelings of loss of identity, betrayal, and isolation; it eventually evolved into this blog. And while I made a concerted effort to write regularly in the months leading up to my stem cell transplant, the actual act of sitting down to write still largely happens when the mood strikes, or when I feel compelled to decant a particularly overwhelming moment onto the page. Until now.

I just accepted a position in a graduate-certificate creative writing program, which starts in January 2023 with my mentor of choice. I feel a little like an imposter sneaking into the big-girl party, and what I’m wishing above all at this point is that it doesn’t (read: I don’t) become a massive embarrassment. As a mitigation strategy, I’ve now completed what should have been done before applying to this program on a whim: my research. And unsurprisingly to everyone but me, it turns out that good writing is rarely an act of whimsy, but something that might emerge only with dedication to a writing routine. Sit down daily. Write something. Try to refrain from judging oneself too harshly at the start. Repeat regularly until perhaps, over time and with guidance, something usable might emerge.

I have four months to get myself into a creative writing habit, and so far I’ve done a lot of procrastinating. Today, though, is a good start. Here’s hoping that by sharing my news it will feel more real, will make me feel more like a writer - and will make me more accountable to the process of showing up to a blank page, every day, with an open heart.