Abbie as a young student, writing at Sages Pages in Madison, NJ.
Ironically, it feels almost impossible to put into words how meaningful writing is to me. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been a college student for 3+ years, and, because of that, my writing has woefully sat, mostly untouched, in months old Google drive folders. Perhaps it’s because my spit on the page doesn’t seem to glisten the way it used to. Perhaps it’s because the older and older I get, the harder it is to write about things that don’t seem to matter. Every word on the page feels as though its obliged to carry the weight of my immigrant family, the weight of the LGBTQ community I never thought I would consider myself a part of, the weight of every 21 year old woman who can’t figure out what to eat for breakfast, let alone figure out who they are or why they are.
Abbie as our Summer Creative Writing Intensives Coordinator at Drew.
Writing, before I hit this very obvious quarter-life crisis, was always an escape into an altered reality. In this reality, I was wholly in control of the narrative, down to who said what when, down to every minuscule movement in facial expressions. My characters, settings, stories, and poems were mine to puppeteer, and there was such safety in that. But somehow the security blanket of a manufactured reality doesn’t emit the same warmth it used to. Instead, I feel more scared.
Luckily, I think this fear is something most writers dream of. Good writing shouldn’t feel safe. Or easy. And as I grapple with this concept, I am learning that writing isn’t about taking control of the narrative. Instead, it is about leaving all preconceived notions of control at the door and truly, selflessly letting go. Allowing myself to delve into a sea of vulnerability, knowing all too well how bad I am at swimming.
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Abbie Davidson was The Writers Circle’s very first intern, a position she held from age 13 until we hired her as our Summer Creative Writing Intensive Coordinator for two summers, 2017-18. Abbie is currently completing her senior year at Fordham University. This blog post was written in response to a call to current and former TWC students for short essays about what writing means the them, in celebration of The Writers Circle’s 10th anniversary.
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