Our theme for the month of June is “confessions.”
I did not grow up thinking I was a particularly great writer. Whether it was because I was homeschooled and had no peers to compare myself to, or whether it was because my younger self could not understand that you could be good at both math and language arts, I had no faith in my writing abilities.
During my sophomore year of high school, my honors English teacher, Ms. Whit, recommended that I move down from the honors class. It felt like further evidence that a math or science track was the route I’d take in college. (In reality, my parents had simply signed me up too late and I never received the summer reading list, and at the time, I simply could not keep up with both reading assignments.)
It was not until near the end of my junior year that I had an inkling that I had any talent for writing, but within a year, I had a new life goal: write a novel by the time I was twenty five.
How hard could it be? After all, if Mary Shelley was publishing Frankenstein at twenty years old, then I surely could publish something at twenty five.
I certainly tried. I still have dozens of word docs I abandoned in my early twenties in my Google Drive or on my hard drive. Stories I excitedly started but was bored of ten pages in. No matter the idea, I found I could not stretch out a plot.
By the time I was a sophomore at Calvin I realized that maybe comparing myself to the greats of literature and then adding a five-year buffer to that was naïve, but I still hoped to one day write something worth publishing.
During my senior year, I thought I was finally breaking through. Thanks to a writing class that gave me deadlines, I wrote several pieces I saw potential in, though ultimately found unsatisfactory. Unlike the stories that sat in my drive, however, they reached a finish line.
I hoped that a semester of story writing would motivate me. Instead, after graduating, the momentum died.
Four years later, I can’t recall the last time I wrote anything substantial. I’ve had ideas, but they are sparring. The ideas that were running rampant through my head in my late teens and early twenties have practically all evaporated. When I try to write a story now, I struggle to get past one hundred words.
I don’t know where I go from here as a writer, either. Thanks to the post calvin, I’ve had to write something every month. But since joining, I’ll admit that there has hardly been a time I feel great about what I wrote. The majority of the time, I find myself trying to figure out what I even want to write on the 21st of the month (I didn’t come up with the idea for this piece until 10 p.m. on the 21st).
Truthfully, I often don’t know if what I write is good or not. There have been more than a few occasions where I wonder if what I’m submitting is just 600 words of incoherent rambling. Whenever I do get positive feedback, I’m more surprised than assured in my writing abilities.
I want to write. I want to be a great writer, but at this stage in my life, it’s hard to imagine that I’ll ever produce anything substantial. In a sense, I have just about as much confidence that I’ll write anything substantial as I did over a decade ago.
Mitchell Barbee graduated from Calvin University with a B.A. in writing in 2021. Originally from Boone, North Carolina, he is currently residing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He enjoys hanging out with the few friends who stayed, wearing grey hoodies, and hoping that he doesn’t get sucked into the nightly wormhole of watching a baseball game.
