I am a writer.
An obvious statement to you, my reader, but it wasn’t an easy title to embrace. It took me two years into opening my first restaurant to refer to myself as chef and about as long to feel comfortable wearing a chef coat. We had one cook in the opening days that I referred to as chef because she had been to culinary school, which was much more education that I had ever undertaken.
So what is/was my hesitance in adopting a title that I obviously hold?
My simple answer: It’s easier to let someone else identify us than to believe who we truly are.
Hopefully I’m in the 3rd quarter of my life but am just now discovering where my identity comes from. You would think by now I would have it all figured out but Hope is on my sidelines walking with me to the field to ensure that my best days are ahead of me and She won’t let me slink into the 4th quarter with nothing left to achieve.
Writing is a late-in-life discovery for me. I discovered it by communicating about loss and grief. It was a way for me to sort through the littered pieces of that which had been shattered and try to reassemble them in a form that might make some sense. I imagine words are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that have been abruptly dumped on the floor, and writing is the process of picking them up one by one, placing them on the table, and beginning to see which ones fit together and form a discernible picture. But in this case, I don’t have the lid to compare it to and know if I’m on the right track or not.
I was a terrible student growing up. Terrible in the eyes of a school system for a creative kid that did not like to sit still, listen and pay attention. This boyish energy was seen as a threat to the teachers and administration. My education could be summed up in this statement: “Shinn, sit down and shut up!”
If my English teacher could see that I have written three published books and hundreds of poems and blogposts, she would admit that she could not take credit for any of it. The kid who would rather draw or look out the window than write a sentence or solve a math problem picked up writing somewhere way down the road past high school.
I’m not sure how I graduated. I hated school. I hated adults. I swear the school board hired all their teachers and coaches as fresh graduates from the University of Hell. And they hated me too. There was one wicked soul specifically that had it out for me on day one. It was the first day of 10th grade. I was sitting at the third desk from front, along the window side, when the teacher came straight at me and pointed his nicotine stained finger at my face and said, “I’ve heard of you and you are not going to disrupt my classroom. If you think you can, try me and see what you get.” Little did I know that would lead to three years of physical abuse from the man with a mahogany wood paddle that he handcrafted in his woodshop for the purpose of inflicting as much pain as possible on the backside of young men he singled out as his victims. I would go on to get beaten for talking, beaten for being late, beaten for looking at him wrong. He was sick with some kind of power that even if I saw him outside of class at an event or ballgame, he would intimidate me with a threat of a beating when we got back to class on Monday.
And what was even more messed up? This was seen as acceptable behavior by the administration, teachers and coaches who witnessed this wrongdoing. I got a high school intimidation, not education. My diploma was written in broken blood vessels and welts on my buttcheeks. And, sadly, I didn’t know the difference. I didn’t know because I wasn’t led to consider any other way.
I was in a therapy session about five years ago when I told this story in passing to my therapist. When I got to the part about the paddlings, she stopped me immediately and asked me to repeat that part of the story. She looked me straight in the eye and said, “Kevin, do you know what you describe is abuse?”
I replied, “No ma’am. I just thought it was high school.”
Something new was set in motion that day when the therapist reinterpreted my story and began to help me see who I really am, not a rebellious troublemaker who the wicked teacher tried to convince me I was. She helped me see my creative energy was good, and important, not something that needed to be beaten out of me so I could stay in line.
For years I took a stance with this statement, “I probably shouldn’t, but I know I’m going to.” That sounds like I’m about to do something immoral or addictive, but it turns out to be the opposite.
I wasn’t supposed to speak up, but I did anyway.
I got a chance to speak up to the wicked man recently in the form of a dream I had about him. It was a very troubling vision where I encountered him in his old age, near his death. I held his mahogany paddle in my right hand. He was feeble and frail, but still full of rage instead of what, at his condition, should have been regret. I raised the paddle to strike him and he fell to his knees, but still defiant, not asking for mercy. I lowered the paddle and threw it at his feet and returned with a staredown. And said this.
“I won’t become you.” and I walked away.
Then I woke up.
In a moment, I was free from that wicked man’s curse. The three years of hell I endured in high school at his domination was over. I hadn’t done anything wrong and I wasn’t going to carry that weight any longer. I can’t return and get those lost years back, but I can move forward now with a new identity with a new purpose. Even as I sit down to write this, or do anything creative, I get to say outloud:
“I know I should do this, and so I’m going to.”
These are among my new confessions of my truest identity that I have taken back from the wicked man in high school:
I am a creative soul, not a scoundrel as I was labeled
I am an artist, not a malcontent beaten with a wooden weapon.
And the trouble I cause the insecure will just have to be.
Yes, I am a writer. I can call myself that. Free to write. Free to invite you into my world of words. Free to invite you to confront your demons and silence them with truth. Free to set yourself and others free.
That’s good news.
