To me writing is a form of communication that far exceeds what my mouth can verbalize. If I can get a thought out of my brain, it will come out extremely detailed if I type or write it out. I do my best writing when it is “stream of consciousness” because I can really just say what’s on my mind, which for me is a lot. Also, if I have an interesting story, I can tell it better if type or write it out. However, if it’s something particularly boring to me I struggle to get out, or even find details about the topic.
As I mentioned before, I can tell a good story by writing it down. When I tell it to you out loud, it usually doesn’t sound as good, unless the story is just funny no matter how you tell it, but when I put it on paper, or type it on a computer screen, I can describe the details better and thus tell the story more efficiently. Here’s one example: In high school, I was on track team and because I was on the track team I, obviously, went to track meets. So at one of these meets, some of my teammates were competing in a relay race. The first 3 runners ran their laps and passed the baton to the next runner, but by the last runner, he ran up to my coach in the middle of the race to ask where lane one was, of course no one on the team answered this question because we were all too busy either laughing at him or telling him to run. Eventually, he kept running, but when he came to the finish line, he slowed down and walked through it. Everyone on the team was either pissed off or hysterically laughing at what just happened. A decent amount of details right? Now see if I had described that to you verbally you probably wouldn’t have gotten as much information as you just did. The reason for this may stem from my early childhood.
When I was younger (and even to this day), I was a very quiet person very rarely talking unless it was to my friends. Sometimes, if someone made a joke about me, I would take it personally and automatically accuse them of bullying me. Over the years, I did get more and more talkative and eventually a harder shell for smack talk, but I still had a few communication flaws. For instance, if I got into an argument, I would more often than not lose said argument due to me not being able to formulate a good convincing argument(the other reason being the opponent knew better), so because of that I avoided arguments and confrontation altogether. But little did I know that was also not a good thing because I was holding it in. On top of that, I would get into situations that were emotionally taxing sometimes and take my mind off of it by either playing video games, watching anime, or listening to music(none of which were a permanent solution). Then one day, I had gotten into a disagreement with both of my parents and was extremely angry and irritated as a result of it. I remember for a good hour I could not think about anything else other than the events that had just taken place. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I decided to write it out, and when I did, it was like the anger was leaving my body and I felt so much better and was able to think straight again. So now sometimes I write what goes on in my mind, primarily if something is contributing to a “negative” emotion like anger, irritation, concern, genuine confusion, and/or uncertainty.
Despite all of this, I actually don’t like to write often. For most of my life I never truly enjoyed writing an essay and viewed them as a pain overall. Once I got to this class and started to do stream of conscious writing my opinion of writing started to shift a little to a more positive outlook.
