Reflecting on my writing journey feels strange, because in many ways it feels like I’ve just started. In my last few years of middle school, and all throughout high school, I preferred academic writing to the point of dreading any creative writing assignments. I understood what was expected of me with analytical writing, while the vast amounts of freedom creative writing offered was intimidating. I also didn’t want other people reading my own writing, because I was worried about what people thought of me, and criticisms of my writing felt like criticisms of myself. That discomfort with others reading my work was easier to bear with any type of academic writing I did, as my sense of self didn’t really end up bleeding onto the page. 

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Therefore I treated creative writing like the Forbidden Forest. Any exploration was fraught with the danger of death, and if for some unavoidable reason exploration was absolutely necessary… then an abundance of caution had to be exercised. That caution meant I was liable to hightail my effort out of a creative writing project as fast as I could if I so much as felt like I was sharing too much, or thought I was going to make a fool of myself. 

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But then, in the fall semester of my second year here, I started wondering about what exactly the Forbidden Forest had to offer. I felt imbalanced as a writer, like I was completely neglecting training a muscle out of fear of past injury. So I decided to register for a creative writing class, which seemed like jumping out of an airplane and parachuting down right into the middle of the Forbidden Forest. But once I landed, I didn’t feel completely and totally lost. Life had gotten more complicated as I got older, and I found writing my thoughts down could help deal with my constant fixation on them. I had moved from Connecticut, where I’d spent the first seventeen years of my life, to Michigan, and fiercely missed my friends, and the moments I’d never get to have with them. But those feelings were something I could write about. I’d started having my first relationships – sometimes making an idiot out of myself, being happy a lot of the time, and then unfortunately crushingly sad. All of those things were definitely something I could write about. I started seeing the humor in some of the questionably smart decisions I’d made in previous years, like going to my first ever frat party in socks and slides. That was something to write about too. All of those experiences illuminated paths through the Forbidden Forest, and so I started my journey through it. 

 

But that’s not to say any of those paths were easy. The things I wanted to write about were difficult to put into words, especially as a writer that was used to formal, academic writing. I couldn’t quite think of a way to write a nicely structured, five paragraph essay with an overarching thesis about my fear of missing out on spending time with my high school friends in Connecticut. It was difficult to speak aloud about that sort of stuff, let alone coherently put it into writing. But I kept trying, because no matter how harshly I judged its quality, writing down my feelings got them out of my head and into the world. It’s much easier to confront or decide how you feel about something when it’s words on a page and not dancing around in your mind. 

 

Even sharing my work, the big bad monster lurking in the Forbidden Forest, didn’t turn out like I’d envisioned it. Workshop day felt like I was approaching a welcoming clearing with a campfire, around which fellow explorers were gathered. I didn’t care about what they would think of my writing, and by extension me. Maybe that’s because I barely knew anyone in my class, but to me it mattered far more what people thought of the things I was talking about. I wanted to hear if my classmates had gone through similar experiences. What had they done? And if they hadn’t, could they still relate to my writing? What did they think of it? How did my words make them feel?

 

All of those questions are still ones I’m interested in, particularly given what I’ve written about for my fully realized project. I again chose something difficult to write about during my time in this gateway class – my thoughts about and issues with body image. Writing about this subject has helped me deal with my feelings, but it's also been one of the hardest things I've tried to do when it comes to writing. Ever. Before this class, writing had never really been this difficult. I've accepted the hardship though, because the difficultly means I'm writing about something complex and significant. The writing I've done has been worth the time and effort, even if it still feels like something of a mess. But I really shouldn't have expected anything else out of exploring the Forbidden Forest.