Diary To Cloud

My first poem came to me in a dream. For a third grader who had only ever written short stories in English class and read poems for friendly competitions, it was my own version of the Great Enlightenment. Overnight, ten stanzas and countless rhymes seemed to appear out of nowhere. I woke up the next morning and rushed to tell my parents what I had created, and they rushed to share it with everyone else. I realized that picking words and weaving them into a sequence of lines and stories was something I could see myself enjoying. 

For the first time in my life, I had a new brand that I had chosen for myself. I was a poet. I was a writer. I was a 10 year old who had finally found something in common with the authors of all the books I loved reading. From that day, my short but intense writing career began and since then, it’s only created greater opportunities for me. I created my blog where I publish book reviews, poetry and the occasional short story or two. I wrote my first short story using the drawings my dad made for me, inserting them into a novel about a girl who travels to space. I published it on my blog and even roped in my mom’s friend to write an author introduction for it. If the opportunity to write came up in my classes, I was always the first one to present my writing to my teacher, beaming with pride as she shared it with the rest of the class. 

In high school, I was chosen to be in SCAPA, the School of Creative and Performing Arts, as a writing major. For the first time since writing my first poem, I had a group of people who would regularly read my writing and actively give me feedback. I had my first round of feedback where I heard about what worked in my pieces but more importantly, what didn’t. I was now holding myself up to the level of a professional writer. 

For the second time in my life, I had given myself a new label. Adding the level of calling myself a professional in something added a new level of pressure and expectations on my shoulders. Now, people expect me to regularly produce high quality writing. More than that, I expected that from myself. Soon, I was approaching my biggest writing challenge yet. One that, quite literally, determines my future: college essays. 

As a self proclaimed “professional writer”, writing a college essay should’ve been a cakewalk. I’ve written dozens of essays for English classes that have made my teachers happy. I’ve written essays in AP tests and scored well. I wrote essays for fun. A college essay shouldn’t be anything different. Yet, when I sat down to actually brainstorm ideas about what to write, I had nothing. An empty Google Document, staring back at me. Nothing. 

I looked back at my prompt, “What is an interest or identity that would make your application complete?”, and that made me reflect on why I fell in love with writing in the first place. It wasn’t just to channel my creative energy into words and sentences. It wasn’t just to write poems to perform for my family, and it wasn’t just to write blogs for my internship; it’s something that makes me uniquely who I am.

Being a writer means so much more to me because it’s a label I’ve given myself, not someone else. Throughout the years, I’ve taken that label and cultivated it into a persona that was born the day I wrote my first poem. A new version of me that is mine, completely.