Hello again! It’s been a few sleeps since I’ve written a post. The last couple of weeks have gone by so fast I can’t believe September is upon us already. Since my last post I’ve taken a couple of writing classes online, read an amazing some amazing books and learned a lot about my writing. I am going all in as a writer. So I enrolled in a non-fiction class through Catapult and I have learned so much about myself, my writing and my process. Before this class, I hadn’t really written anything that was about me specifically. Never. I wrote poetry and still do but there are ways to easily disguise words and actions within the poetic boundaries. I mean you don’t want your fifth-grade crush to know you wrote about him. So this class you guys have helped me unpack and explore my own story as a person. Writing about my life has given me the opportunity to see beyond what I have experienced and reflect on it.
Writing about my experiences was hard in the beginning and still is because it’s a part of you that’s going on the page. I didn’t know where to start, did I have to start in chronological order, what if I ended up repeating myself, what if no one read what I had to say, I had all these questions. I think I was having a hard time because I hadn’t dedicated some time to think about a certain subject or event in a long time, I hadn’t talked about some of the things I wrote. But once I dedicated some time to think about my life and experiences in terms of ‘story’ such as “this happened, this is how I felt, and I think this”. Lightly connecting one thing with another hoping the reader will notice. Doing this required me to slow down a lot in order to get the event/topic down on paper just as I remembered it with detail and perspective. I’m still learning.
One of the first things I thought was how I was able to think of plot lines, dialogue and backstory for a world I created, but I couldn’t write about what’s happened to me already or my opinion on a certain topic. A lot of it has to do with being comfortable writing about yourself and experience. I felt ready to take that step so I took the class.
Currently, I am still learning my style and my approach although I have noticed that everything I’ve written so far has been approached differently. A lot of patience has been necessary as I learn to focus on a specific topic and experience(s), memories and then carefully string them together for the piece. A personal essay requires you to give your heart to the piece to go to places that you might not have thought you wanted to go and explore once more. It’s been heartbreaking and relieving to write about my experiences about being an immigrant, a Latinx writer and living with type one diabetes.
Maybe you might not have known that about me.
Hi there nice to meet you!
Lemmon Avenue 