When I was in elementary school, every student was required to submit a piece of creative writing for the annual Young Authors Conference. Teachers would then comb through all of our entries and select the top writers from each grade, announcing the winners in front of the entire school during an assembly.
Along with the coveted notoriety, upon each budding novelist was bestowed a thick pencil glued to a chunk of wood and spray-painted metallic bronze, silver, or gold, indicating the rank of the winners. And yes, I’m going to brag that every year I came home with an award because I was a frickin’ good little writer. Alas, not that good because each year I would come home with the silver award tucked into my backpack, yearning for the day when the gold would be mine.
Then it happened! Finally! One year I penned a gripping tale of a young girl who won $35,000.00 in a sweepstakes and gave some of the money to her mother ($13,000 to be exact) so that she would finally be able to visit her family in Cuba. The mother, returning from her trip, tanned by the Caribbean sun and full of gratitude for her daughter’s generous gift, brought the girl back a little yellow parakeet named Joe.
What I did with the other $22,000 of my imaginary prize winnings was not important. I don’t know. Maybe I put it in a make-believe bank. All that mattered was that I had won the gold award (suck it, silver winners!). And in addition to my chunky gold spray painted pencil Pulitzer, my story was published in the thick spiral bound anthology of that year’s winning authors – copies of which were reserved only for the school librarian and the two gold winners from each grade. Not only that, but my parents ended up getting me an actual parakeet to commemorate my achievement.
The damn thing died two days later – RIP, Joe – but his story will live on forever in my heart and in the Young Authors canon of 1983.
My love of all things literary eventually led me to graduating with a degree in English from Saint Joseph’s University (The Hawk Will Never Die!!), and all was well. That is until the Great Dissertation Meltdown of 2017.
Despite my initial plan to find work as a writer, my career path took a careening left turn, and I ended up working in the mental health field. Finding that I really loved it, I went on to get my master’s in counseling, and a few years after that, decided it would be a good idea to pursue my PhD in the same field. Foolish girl.
Of course, writing a dissertation was part of the process. Piece of cake, right? After all, I did have the advantage of a BA in English. No. That shit broke me. It was a treacherous soul-sucking chore that consumed every free moment of my increasingly dreadful life, made worse by the self-important sadists on the IRB.
As soon as my degree was conferred and I heard, “Congratulations, Dr. Wharton” I told myself I was DONE. I was so burned out on the written word that I vowed to shun writing for the rest of my life…or at least for the next eight years, which wasn’t the original goal, but you know what they say about the best laid plans.
After one particularly cathartic session with my therapist, I decided to jot down some of my thoughts for later reflection. That simple act, like the oxytocin that helps a mother forget how much labor sucked, helped me realize that I missed writing a lot more than I admitted to my stubborn-ass self (I can’t help it. I’m a Taurus). That dusty neglected piece of me I had been storing on the shelf for almost a decade began to wake up. So I kept writing, and after a few weeks of sharing those little musings with her, my therapist finally said, “You should start a blog.” And so I did.