If I’d known writing would one day save my heart, maybe I wouldn’t have treated it so badly at the start. You see, I hated writing. I don’t mean the kind of hate casually thrown around a classroom because students find writing a bother. When I say hate, I mean the kind that stems from an inability to carry out a task, the kind that taps so deeply into your insecurities it physically hurts.
So, where did all this hate come from? Well, to understand it, I’ll have to reveal something to you — something I used to hide because I was afraid it would undermine my credibility as a writer: English is not my native language. I didn’t use it outside the classroom until I was ten, when my family moved to Michigan from Hong Kong. The thing about language is that your ability to learn it, to master it, decreases with age. So there I was, only ten years old but already feeling too old, dreading the challenges English would present to me.
And it was hard — harder than I thought. English was so out of my grasp that, eventually, I learned to fear it. I began to treat English like borrowed things. I gave extra care to all the words I used, avoiding mistakes so that when it’s time to return it, there would be no trace of damage. Little did I know this habit would paralyze me. I went from stumbling through English to not using it at all if I didn’t have to, naively thinking this was the best way to avoid mistakes. All this is to say that when I encountered fear and had the choice to face it or run from it, I ran.
Oh, how I ran. I ran so far and for so long that I thought I could keep running forever. But of course, consequences had a way of dragging me back. While running away from fear, I passed up countless learning opportunities. I could have made new friends and talked to them in English to improve my speaking. I could have asked my teachers for help on essays to save my grade in English. But I didn’t. Instead, I continued to run under the weight of consequences, eventually disguising my fear as hate.
Of all the skills I needed to learn (reading, listening, speaking), I hated writing the most. Perhaps it’s because writing has a way of immortalizing mistakes, forcing you to pause and actually face them — the complete opposite of what I wanted to do. For this reason, my hatred for writing solidified, and it marched on all the way until my junior year of high school.
My junior year of high school — how can I sum it up? It’s difficult to revisit it because it took a lot to recover from it. Simply put, 17-year-old me was very sad. At one point, pain overflowed my heart so much that I could no longer hold it in. Desperate to relieve it, I did something out of the ordinary. I opened up a blank document and started writing.
I wrote about my fears and worries and dreams and secrets — everything in my heart laid wide open. To my surprise, writing held my heart when nothing else did. It caught every word, every sentence, even every mistake and never judged me. All it did was lighten the weight of pain from my chest, and I wondered how I could have ever hated it.
From then on, writing filled my heart with something new, something so warm and tender it wrapped itself around my chest like a tight embrace. It’s a new passion, I realized, a new love. Armed with it, I turned towards other aspects of English. This time I stood firm as I faced fear. I let my passion for writing guide me.
One step at a time, writing first led me towards reading, another quiet pursuit. Unexpectedly, it came naturally. I think the secret is that everything in language is connected. As I mastered one aspect of it, my other abilities, intangibly intertwined with writing, improved as well.
Following reading was listening and speaking. Two sides of the same coin, they loomed over me more severely because they required me to talk with others. I was terrified of being judged if I misinterpreted others’ words or stumbled over my own. Despite my fear, I pressed on with the courage writing lent me. In the end, it worked; the fear I avoided for so long finally disappeared.
Moving forward, I hope one day I can do what writing did for me. I hope to achieve a level of mastery where I can hold my readers’ hearts with the words that come from mine. An impossible dream, my ten-year-old self would say. But now, with fear out of my way, this dream doesn’t seem so far away.
MiC Columnist Tian Yeung can be reached at tiyeung@umich.edu.