WP 4: Finding my Voice in Words

This semester has taken me through a roller coaster of emotions. Not necessarily this class, but zoom school and living at home and moving to LA and the friends and relationships that come from all of that. I am an actor. I express myself through words and through music. I live to perform. That has all been taken away from me during the pandemic. I don’t have that same safe space that I once did and for the first time in my life, I really felt lost. This semester has been insane. I have learned so much about myself and how I deal with problems because for the first time in my life I am facing most of my problems alone, without having the ability to perform away anxiety (yes I am aware that usually it goes the other way).

While reading through medium posts from other classes, I discovered that I wasn’t alone in being overwhelmed and scared during my first year in college, especially over zoom. Micheal Farmer’s writing really spoke out to me:

I still subconsciously subscribe to the idea that bad decisions make for good stories, I’m writing these words to avoid working on tasks that are more urgent but less pleasant, I’m simultaneously too hard on myself and too easy on myself, I don’t take myself seriously and I take myself too seriously, I let the dishes pile up, I broke a swing set, I avoid necessary confrontation. — Michael Farmer

I felt exactly the same pressures and anxiety from life that he described in this quote. I would be “too hard on myself and too easy on myself” like he said. This was very much the case when I wrote as well. I would think well this sucks, but it’s my words so who is to tell me what to do? It was a constant battle in my head that has happened since before I can even remember.

My whole life I hated writing. I never thought I was any good at putting words on a paper in a way that followed all the rules and got my point across. I was always too “unintellectual” or ended up filling paper with unnecessary words and descriptors. Up until the end of high school, I assumed I would never be a good writer.

BUT, because this semester I didn’t have my escape of theatre and performing, I had to find other ways to express myself. This came to me through my ability to write. Thankfully I decided to take this section of Writing 150, because it was here that I truly found a new way to be myself.

I began shaky, as most probably did. I had never had this much freedom in a class before, nonetheless a writing class. Who makes a WRITING class where you DON’T have to follow the traditional grammar rules or five paragraph essay format? Apparently USC does. It was a weird balance trying to find my voice while also trying to write intellectually. To be honest, I still struggle with it sometimes while writing. I want the reader to know that it is me, Haley, speaking and not a random robot telling you about “the benefits of stand-up comedy”.

If you are not yourself on the page, it’ll pull on you, and you will, eventually, burn out. — Mason Sabre

This quote dictated exactly why I struggled so much with writing my entire life. I was never allowed to be myself through my words. This is why I loved theatre so much, because I was able to express myself fully and freely. Writing always made me feel trapped. But that first class when we did our free writes and I just wrote… I got the same feeling that I did when I was performing. There was no one telling me what I could and couldn’t write. I was free to let my fingers dance around the keyboard in whatever way they wanted and frankly, it was exhilarating.

Writing this semester began giving me a way to free myself from the tensions and stress that I felt in my daily life. Similar to what Farmer says, I wrote because I could escape from less pleasant things in my life. Before, I had always turned outward to do that. I went to perform or to talk to people, but I found peace in looking inwards and writing quietly during our relegated class times. Writing medium posts became a release for me to just write whatever my heart desired and I got really good at pinpointing what that actually meant. I was able to look internally and very easily point out emotions that I was concealing and reflect on why they were there through my writing. This was the first shift for me when I realized that writing was more than just grammar and countless/mindless edits.

As the semester progressed, my writing became more passionate because I was less scared to make mistakes. I stopped holding back and really focused on putting MY VOICE out there and not the SAT voice I had been trained to use. At first, it was really scary. My WP 1 was not great. I was unsure of the balance between my voice and fluff. I needed to dig deeper and really think about WHY I was writing and WHY it was so important to me.

In my WP 2 I stopped trying so hard. I got to the point, and I found my voice quicker. This is because of all the practice we had done in class and because I was finally more comfortable with my words. I felt confident enough to stop hiding behind someone who I thought my professor wanted to see. This was so important for my journey as a writer this semester because I finally was able to be free in my work and for the first time I felt a true connection to what I had written.

This same path continued through my writing of WP 3. I struggled at first because I was scared to write such a long paper about something so unique and personal to me, but as I brainstormed ideas I realized that it didn’t need to be ridiculously complicated. I needed to stop working so hard, take a deep breath, and write. When I fully relaxed my mind and just let myself be free to write, I ended up having so much more fun than when I wrote our first paper because I was able to find my voice more when I wrote. My topic fell into place and I wasn’t worried about not sounding intellectual because I trusted myself and my brain to do that without me forcing it. I took comments on my medium posts and the notes from my first two writing projects and applied them to WP 3 making it something that I was confident in. That paper became one of the first pieces of real educational writing that I turned in proud of myself.

This semester has been one of growth for me especially through my writing. It was the first time that I was really able to find my voice and use it in my writing confidently. Everything has changed over the past year and I really had to push myself to find a new escape from the world. What was so interesting about it, was that my escape changed from looking for external approval to more internal successes. I believe that this is really important long-term and has really benefited me because I rely more on myself for the strength that I had previously gotten from other people. The strength comes from my writing and my voice within my works. I no longer feel like I sound uneducated when I write how I want. I know that I sound intelligent and that my education and confidence is enough. I’ve learned this semester that I don’t need to try so hard to be someone that I am not in my writing because I am enough.

Works Cited:

Farmer, Michael. “Executive Functioning of the Late-Stage Teenage Brain.” Medium, Writing 150 Spring 2021, 29 Apr. 2021, medium.com/writing-150-spring-2021/executive-functioning-of-the-late-stage-teenage-brain-e15ed4330f9.

Long, Haley. “WP1: How Comedy Made Me Powerful.” Medium, Writing 150 Spring 2021, 29 Apr. 2021, medium.com/writing-150-spring-2021/wp1-how-comedy-made-me-powerful-3a7b04c28f94.

Sabre, Mason. “Finding Your Writing Voice.” Medium, The Indie Author Project, 29 May 2019, medium.com/the-write-club/finding-your-writing-voice-cde875a0c018.