The story appears on

Page B1

March 28, 2023

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » Feature » Education

Writing, my third parent, helps me exfoliate my shell

I started writing when I was in second grade. During English class, my teacher encouraged us to make picture books. Mine was based on a fictional family trip to wintry New Hampshire. To encapsulate it, I poured hours into my craft and outlined the knobby stick figures I drew using Crayola markers.

It was all worth it, though. At the end, my laminated storybook was put on a wooden display rack. The smiley sunshine sticker with “Exemplary!” on it sowed the seed of passion inside me. And unlike my height, it didn’t stop growing.

Writing became much more than classwork for me when I entered middle school. Other than writing argumentative essays on why classroom pets should be outlawed, I also dabbled in Percy Jackson fanfiction and poetry. I started posting my work on Quotev and Wattpad.

The feedback I got from others boosted my self-confidence and cemented my determination to make my digital identity real.

Additionally, I joined our school’s creative literary magazine and newspaper; it was there I started publishing my fiction and developing my journalism skills. I also started opening up to people who had seemed hard to approach at first. Mainly, people who had the same tastes in books as me. The majority of them enjoyed writing, too, and we’d have fun cracking open our Chromebooks and typing out creative fiction stories on Google docs. Suffice to say, writing helped me exfoliate my shell.

It also helped me give voice to my thoughts at night. I could develop deeper the paradoxes and unanswerable questions, such as whether the chicken or the egg came first and why individuals of a species would take care of unrelated offspring. The latter, however, as I later discovered in AP Biology, was not a paradox.

Nonetheless, writing became my closest confidant, a third parent, and some invisible page in my passport. Simultaneously, it was a medium through which I could express myself, something to express myself to, and who I was. Without writing, I would never be who I am today.




 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend