Writing frantically, page after page in my cheap spiral-bound notebook with flowers and French writing on the cover, I listened for approaching steps up the stairs. I wasn't allowed to lock the door to my room, so any failure to hear an impending invasion of my living space was a failure to keep my writing self separate from my family self. At age eleven that's a lot of pressure to put on a kid.
Most teens and preteens seemed to hate parental interference for more understandable reasons. They smoked pot or cigarettes, maybe even had sex. They would follow the likewise common course of behavior to avoid their parents, yelling, screaming and plastering “Keep out!” stickers all over their bedroom door.
Future writers tend to assert their independence a little differently. They need their privacy as well, but they also are bleeding their soul onto a piece of paper each time they write. This soul is less developed than the one adults transpose into writing, and its proprietor is generally acutely aware of the fact. At an already sensitive age it is imperative that young writers have the opportunity to work through their self-doubt and self-inflated ego alike.
As a preteen I never hated my parents or shooed them out of my lives; they always asked how I was and were always genuinely interested in my welfare, making my fear of their intervention seemingly inexplicable.
I expected the confrontation to come with my writing, the only hobby I'd tried to keep a secret. When I began filling up that cheap notebook, I scrawled bad poetry all over it. My attempts at literary greatness were absolute tripe, though they did have some of the basic elements. I wasn't too terrible for such a young writer, and a first-time one, but in my mind the worst travesty in my short life would be for my parents to read my pathetic scribbling and realize that my deepest thoughts actually resided in the baby pool.
In truth, the thought of my parents realizing anything about me absolutely paralyzed me. To define the woman I was becoming was akin to limiting me, and I liked the idea of having limitless potential. It was like a drug for me, and accordingly, the notebook filled up in under a year.
I justified the secrecy because I foresaw the hurt and misunderstanding I'd be faced with when they discovered I didn't want them to read my writings. Even now I find it hard to share my writing with people who know me well, and myself with people who know my writing.
I wrote about birth, death, truth, imagination, and even sex. When not doubting my ability to so much as take down a fast food order, I took myself seriously, and kept it secret because I knew no one else would. It was a great ego trip, to know that everyone in the world who had ever read one of my pieces believed that it reached to the very depths of what makes any given person sentient.
I wasn't able to keep it a secret that I was writing, only what I wrote, and my ego got in the way of that. I submitted one of my poems to our county fair with hopes of being seen as the next poet laureate and somehow wrangled a second-place ribbon. Like all of my work, it had intense themes, and the talks I'd feared came about the night after they read it for the first time, posted on the wall in the Dixie Classic Fair Educational Building.
Whenever my parents spoke with me about anything that mattered it always sounded like some kind of after-school special on a women's cable network, and this was no exception. "We love you and believe in you, but we want to look out for your welfare." I expected to hear the lectures on a far more regular basis after I dropped the bomb about my plans to live the seemingly aimless and bohemian life of a writer. Their justification was and forever would be, "Our ultimate goal is for you to be happy."
These incidents, where I was supposed to acquiesce because their love for me meant every judgment they made on my life was correct, had become so routine that I simply assumed that everyone's parents said that stuff, and it couldn't be avoided unless you had more pressing matters to worry about - like being an orphan. By the time I started writing, I had all the stuff about being loved down pat and wanted to move beyond it. I felt deep and often dark things, and I didn't want to be afraid of a suicide intervention when I wrote down questions about how people might act at my funeral, or if my existence was predetermined. Besides, if I could move past the things that were important to my parents, then I couldn't seem superficial to them, or so I reasoned.
Now, as a seventeen-year old, it's pretty much out in the open that I'm a writer, and that I intend to pursue the career with the same insatiable passion with which my peers are chasing one another. Even so, it's terribly uncomfortable for me to discuss it with my family, as I attempt to shield myself from their inherent corniness invading any aspect of my still-developing voice. They joke about my dad looking over my contracts and my mom sending my novels out to publishers, but because I understanding that they probably will never change, their making light of a craft I've always taken seriously barely ruffles my feathers.
Self-importance is a core part of developing as a person and a writer. Working on both at the same time makes the material produced more sensitive to aggravation than most nuclear peace treaties.
I believe - having moved past that stage - that keeping my writing for myself was an unintentionally wise move. Everyone needs the chance to develop without outside influence, to sit alone and analyze what of those influences is important, and to learn how to add their own voice to the thundering herd of opinions.
