LOVE & HATE 

 

From hate to love and hate…kinda. I used to hate writing a lot, my teachers would always assign writing assignments that I happened to have no interest in at all. Therefore, I would struggle with writing my essays, the hardest part being the introduction but once I got through it I was able to go with the flow. Even though I hated writing, I always gave it my all and they turn out pretty well, but it wasn’t made with passion. 

This all changed in high school with my English teacher called Trudy. Trudy was my teacher for my junior and senior year. Right from the start I could already get a different vibe from her that I didn’t get from my previous English teachers. She seemed more joyful and excited for our future assignments, which seemed like a lot but wasn’t too much to complain about, it was like the perfect amount. She made her assignments enjoyable by giving us a lot of room to work with. My previous teachers were all pretty strict on what they wanted but this wasn’t the case for Trudy, she gave us creative freedom.  

One of her lessons involved watching a movie and then analyzing it using camera movements and other techniques. Now what does watching movies have to do with writing? She wanted us to break down points of certain techniques that we were interested in and then we would write about it. After that lesson she allowed us to choose and analyze any movie of our choosing. At this time, I was struggling to find a movie and then she mentioned in zoom class that we could use an anime to analyze. This happened during the pandemic, and I was so bored that I decided to start watching anime, which was a surprise to a lot of my friends since I always joked about hating it. I never hated it; I only made those jokes to bother them, and wow was I missing out on a lot of great stuff. I watched so much during the pandemic that as soon as she mentioned we can do anime, the anime demon slayer instantly came up in my head. I got really excited to actually do some writing on something I am passionate about, and I started working on it as soon as the assignment was posted. There was plenty to write about and go into depth, I had a lot of fun working on this assignment and it felt great for once to actually write about something you like. 

Another assignment that she had us do that stuck with me was writing a non-fiction short story and of course we had our creative freedom. We were allowed to pretty much write anything we wanted too as long as it was school appropriate. This assignment took place in senior year where I was still a big fan of anime, but it was slowly fading away for me because I was just too busy to watch any. Brainstorming for this assignment was quite hard since there were so many options for me to write about and I then decided I would write a mystery and action short story. After taking some inspiration from animes I wrote about a mysterious boy who was born at a pond who was born with a curse of immortality during the Edo period. He kept his immortality a secret but then he accidentally revealed his immortality by dying to save his mother. After the villagers saw his power, they feared him, and they tried finding ways to kill him. As for why it was a curse is because every time he died his personality randomly switched, up until the point where he was nothing but pure evil and went off to take revenge for the torture he went through. Back to my assignment, sadly I found myself way over the 1000-word limit, so I had to cut off quite a bit of the details on mystery since I like the action I wrote. Writing this was really fun and even my friends liked it and I felt like I probably could’ve made this into a whole novel, but my laziness got to me, and I never got back to it. 

And then there was the hate. Like I mentioned before I hated strict writings since it leaves me little room to work with and my hardest writing was probably my college essay. Just thinking about it was stressing me out. I had no idea what to write about and my teacher gave us a list of topics that could help us. I was struggling to come up with my own topic because I did not like any that were given to us. My teacher noticed me struggling and pulled me out to brainstorm with her. She gave me a few ideas that I could work with but while I was writing it felt off, so I scrapped it and started thinking about something else. At this point I was falling behind everyone, some people were even done, which stressed me out. As more and more students where finishing up on their drafts I decided to go with a classic topic. 

Going into high school. I’ve thought about how I have grown as a person. I was really shy and only stuck around a tiny group of friends but by senior year I had so many friends and I realized that I had opened up and became more sociable. Now how do I put this on paper? As usual I struggled with getting started on my essay. I skipped planning my essay since I was falling behind, so I went with the flow, gave it my all and boom it is complete. I hated the process but in the end, it was a good essay, and I was proud of it. 

That being said my feelings about writing have changed from hatred to loving certain types of assignments and to not hate writing as much. There is still room for me to improve but writing for me is not as bad anymore. I will also try to be more open minded about my writings and continue to give it my all on my essays.