“How did you decide to become a writer?”
I’ve been on the wrong end of this question several times over the course of my career, and my answer always causes me some level of embarrassment. But I have to say it, because it’s true: I didn’t decide. I sort of just… was. As soon as I knew what words were, I started stringing them together—in orange crayon on printer paper; in fading black ink on the electric typewriter in my mother’s early-90s home office. The results were nonsense for a long time (and sometimes are, still). But eventually, I was lucky enough for words to become my job as well as my calling.
So I’ve, truly, always loved words. And perhaps because writing was so much part of my identity or perhaps because I grew up a fat, shy kid who didn’t do quite as well in the world of extemporaneous, out-loud speaking—likely some combination of both—I’ve been pretty obnoxious about using them “correctly” in my time.
When I was seventeen or so, I created a Facebook group called Selectively Social Grammar Nazis. I know this because I recently rediscovered—and, after dying of cringe, immediately deleted—the page. (In my flimsy defense, it was an actual thing to jokingly refer to oneself as a grammar Nazi in the early aughts; academic papers have even been written on the phenomenon.)
I regularly corrected peoples’ grammar both online and off, a move I now see as classist at best and racist at worst. I once broke off a mounting romance with a kind and handsome man because—well, for a lot of reasons, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say his inability to distinguish then from than in his text messages was a major factor.
And in my pretentious (and deeply insecure) early twenties, I considered my knowledge of grammar the basis of my budding artistic career. As I schlepped off to grad school to write and study poetry, I told myself the creativity I enacted on the English language was based in a firm knowledge of its proper structure—never mind that “proper” is, definitionally, a moving goalpost in linguistics; that languages are living, evolving entities whose rules inevitably break as meaning rushes through like a river carving a canyon.
I was convinced a thorough understanding of English grammar was both an indicator of intelligence and an obvious prerequisite for writing creatively, neither of which is true. While I can’t honestly say I’ve shed these biases entirely, I can at least see, from this decade-later vantage point, what a scared little shit I was being; how thoroughly I was missing the mark.
Case in point: these days, I’m trying to expand my repertoire of words—in Spanish. I’m headed on a trip to Central America in March, and although I grew up less than an hour from Miami, I never learned Spanish well enough to communicate with ease. During my first Spanish lesson in more than 15 years, I was surprised to find I could understand just about everything my tutor, Julio, said as he spoke to me in smooth, patient Spanish for a full hour. I sat there nodding in silence, saying si, comprendo, si, but faltering when it was my turn to speak.
Part of it is the speaking out loud itself, which for a long time left me breathless even in English. Growing up, I used writing as a crutch for crippling shyness; though I often felt too afraid to open my mouth, I knew I could make myself understood in my writing—to the people who cared enough to read it, that is. (It’s no coincidence that my errant Facebook group combined grammatical snobbery with “selective” social ostracism. I felt invisible and alone; I was being defensive.)
While twenty years of living did a lot to hone my social skills, it’s not an accident that I’m still an essayist, still regularly publishing work private and personal enough to be a journal entry. I come to the page to explain myself—primarily to myself, but also to the world. I write for the same reason we speak, the reason we communicate at all: to be seen.
I know, of course, that I have it backwards. In the scope of human history, writing is far younger and far less universal than speech. We are animals moved to connect to one another directly, using our bodies. Writing is an approximation of speech, of the sounds our bodies can make to which we’ve assigned significance—words. (And words are themselves only ever approximations of meaning; we can never quite know what someone else means when they say pain or love or joy. Which is part of why writing feels, to me, like the closest thing on earth to magic: the craft of getting as close to true meaning as we can.)
Still, written language is primarily an emulation of the language we use in real time—which is part of why it shifts so much as we go about the business of hearing ourselves. It’s why I’ve seen, once or twice, the words Ice Coffee instead of Iced Coffee on a café menu. Say the words out loud: do you really pronounce that final d on the adjective before the hard c that starts the noun swallows the sound?
I can admit the disjointed written grammar still irks me when I see it on the board above the barista, but I can understand where the shift comes from—and that my focus on it is, in essence, born primarily of insecurity and a desire for control. I am someone who has, for a long time, dissolved my urge to speak into writing. But language, truly, is conversation—which is why Julio and I chat in class a lot.
Now that we’ve been practicing together for a couple of months, I’m finally able to cobble together sentences sense-making enough to respond with. An alternate-dimension gramatica Nazi version of me who was born in a Spanish-speaking country would not be pleased by my performance, though.
I regularly conjugate both verbs in a sentence where one should stay in the infinitive—Voy a hago ejercicio, I might say when he asks what I’ll do this afternoon, instead of voy a hacer ejercicio—an error that might be translated I am going I am doing exercise rather than I am going to do exercise. I stammer when I come across a concept I’ve yet to assign a Spanish word to, sometimes haltingly offering the English word with an “-a” or “-o” ending before capitulating to ask como se dice…?
It engenders its own kind of creativity, to give voice to a language you don’t know well. The way I speak Spanish is breathless and grasping and, yes, innovative. I’m willing to fit any available word into the empty space of my speaking if it helps, if it’s close—to communicate. To get to the meaning. To be understood.
Julio is an excellent teacher—far more patient than I was as a graduate teaching assistant of 25, making a murder scene of essays in which well-meaning college freshmen “butchered” the English language, as I would have said then. He nods along, smiles, tells me my answers are muy interesante—and importantly, offers gentle corrections as often as I need them. Of course our dialogue lacks the nuance of conversations I’m able to have in English—but we can already get to surprisingly deep places.
On a recent sunny December afternoon, Julio asked me if I had any propósitos del año nuevo. I do have a list of New Year’s resolutions, most of which—set firmer boundaries; stop doing things that aren’t aligned—I avoided bringing up. I didn’t even want to try to explain them in Spanish.
But even on the cusp of 35, with enough confidence to walk into any room on my own and a bevy of friends who regularly tell me they envy my ability to make connections—a skill that seems natural from the outside, I’m told, but is actually one I worked for years to hone specifically because I am naturally so bad at it—I’m still trying to shepherd that scared, “selectively social” high schooler further into the light. One of my resolutions for 2024 is to talk to strangers.
“Ah,” I said to Julio. “Hablar más con… strangers?”
Extraños, he offered—with a raised eyebrow and another que interesante!—before explaining that, in context, I probably wanted to say desconocidos instead.
(“Pero—ya lo has hecho,” he said, then. “Conmigo!” You’ve already done it. With me!)
“Tengo una pregunta mas,” Julio went on, continuing our stream of conversation. “Tienes muchas tatuajes,” he observed rightly—I have many tattoos. In Spanish I am not skilled enough to remember verbatim, he asked—or maybe stated—something the heft of which was, they must come with many stories.
They do. My skin is a network of stories and reminders I’ve been collecting for almost two decades, many of them—no surprise here—written English words. In fact, I’d gotten a new tattoo—more words—inked into my skin just two days before he’d asked, a fact I was able to explain fairly easily.
But Julio wanted more. He wanted to understand what it meant, and why.
The tattoo: the words not kicking & screaming in my own handwriting, tucked along my right forearm in a place that’s almost always visible to me. It’s a tattoo in the reminder category, for sure; one whose story is a little hard to tell even in English.
The short version: last year, I discovered, through a series of serendipitous events, Portland’s Death Café—part of a worldwide movement in which people gather to, and I quote the website directly, “eat cake, drink tea and discuss death.” (I will spare you an explanation as to why I was drawn the Death Café in the first place—or at least one longer than the word grief.) At one of the meetings I attended, one of the facilitators asked the group, “What, in your estimation, is a good death?”
We all went around and said our piece: a death surrounded by loved ones. One not painful. One not cloistered in a hospital’s antiseptic-smelling halls. The conversation swung back around to the facilitator, who said: “I think for me, I just don’t want to go to my death kicking and screaming. And I don’t want to go through life kicking and screaming, either.”
The words reverberated in my head—those who’ve been following along know I’ve had something of a kicking and screaming year or five (or thirty-five). I knew even then they belonged on my body. And so.
I paused, blinking at Julio.
“Es muy complicado para explicar en español,” I said, smiling off to the side of our video-call screen, gathering myself. Julio lives in Costa Rica—where I’m traveling this spring to do ayahuasca, specifically to help with this kicking and screaming problem.
“Pues,” I went on. Well. “En la vida, hay cosas dificiles. Cuando nosotros peleamos estas cosas, no es bueno. Necesitamos… relajar. Y acceptar,” I finished, very proud of myself.
I’d said, in Spanish far more broken than what I’ve just written: In life, there are difficult things. When we fight these things, it’s not good. We need… to relax. And accept.
Julio smiled and nodded at me. He’s whip-smart, but young—26, he told me in one of our first calls—and I wasn’t wholly sure he’d follow. After all, my explanation, stripped of both the facility of fluency and the pause afforded by writing (and editing), left a lot to be desired.
“Es un… uh. Metaphor,” I said.
“Si,” he responded. “Entiendo. Es muy… profundo, ya?” Deep. He scooped his hands downward in front of his body as if to rescue his own heart—precisely what I’m going to his country to try to do.
He understood.