Narrative

You're probably the first to guess that I'm a fan of writing. I almost went to a Saturday night party so a friend and I could spend the time doing character studies of drunk college students, just so we could have material for future stories. And maybe to laugh at people falling over tables and chairs. But mainly of course, for pure intellectual purposes. I could scrawl out stories and poems until my hand starts bleeding onto my pencil--that is, until my English teacher assigns a narrative. Suddenly, telling outlandish stories about my life seems like the most torturous task imaginable. All that floats through my sleep-deprived brain (thank you, construction workers, for that one) are the typical "my first kiss" stories (lame), the new family puppy that ended up trying to eat my brother and I alive, and everyone's rite of passage, the first meditation class in which we were told to open up our sex chakras. So that's a thing that happened.
It's strange how a graded assignment can be a block to creativity. Sure, my friends judge the stories and poems that I do for fun, but it's more like "hey, you've written the boy meets girl, girl feels awkward story ten million times," and then I sulk in my room for a few hours about how I can only write what I know and my life is so transparent that I might as well be walking around with a sheet on my head. The red pen of doom makes having a voice so much more difficult, and the scholarly voice seems to jump onto the page. Trouble is, I am not a scholar. I barely have expertise in my own left foot, much less the jumble of the English language. My use of words such as "ostentatious" and "plethora," make me sound like that person at a party who sits on a couch with her arms crossed, and a judgmental foot tapping onto a beer-vomit soaked floor. The graded assignments are labeled differently, but I know I shouldn't let the context scare me, especially seeing as my teacher looks like someone I could have coffee with and not be scared shitless. But putting a percentage next to my creativity makes me feel as I've had America's Next Top Boring Life, and I should really just write a narrative about how I ate cereal for breakfast. Or something.