Why I write

I grew up in an Accountant’s home. From a young age my brothers and I were trained to make budgets, my father made spreadsheets for us to keep track of our incomes and expenditures. Or only income was a small allowance for doing chores around the house. I got a gig filing my mom’s feet. In true accounting form, our allowance was frugal to say the least and our goals and dreams were long-term at best. 6 months of saving and extra chores and we could buy a lego set, a year and we could get a bigger one.

This style of detailed and frugal management didn’t contain itself to our financial lives; it became our outlook on life. I saw the world in numbers, figures, and deadlines. I planned what I would do during the day while I dressed myself, and stuck to my schedule. I always knew what time it was. I always left time for homework. I made for an efficient student.

When I started high school I started to notice that world wasn’t as organized as I thought it should be. The realization that there were more career paths for me than the financial one I had seen in my home was eye-opening, and arrived at an identity forming time. All of us try to figure out who we are and who we want to be in our teenage years, and I was no different. However, my identity crisis didn’t just involve a career choice between accounting and another career; it involved my outlook on life.

I decided to shed my logical outlook and embrace the humanities.

I developed artist-envy. Musicians, painters, filmmakers, and photographers became my idols. Whether they were the celebrities I saw on the internet or the artsy kids at my high school, I tried to be just like them. I started doodling, took a photography class, taught myself guitar, did anything that couldn’t be created on a spreadsheet. It was a way for me to pretend that I wasn’t becoming my father.

I was not good at any of these things. I can’t draw, sing, or paint. I only play guitar well to people who don’t know anything about guitars. To realize that I would never become an artist was to accept a boring fate in a math-bound career. I couldn’t accept a life completely devoid of creativity and art, but at the same time couldn’t seem to make my life full of it either.

My logical tendencies are a part of me, it’s in my wiring, and I was foolish to try and deny that. My crisis then, became between who I was and who I wanted to be. I decided to take 2 years off as a mormon missionary. My mission became a way of reconciling the two sides of me that weren’t connecting.

In my free time I vented to my notebook. Everything I couldn’t tell my mission leaders, my Brazilian roommates, or my family back home, I wrote in G-2 pilot ink into a simple spiral notebook. My simple angst-ridden complaints and thoughts were therapeutic and let me escape from the pressures of mission life. I would hate to say that I love writing just because of this. It was a phase I went through in my writing that I consider important, mostly because it’s over.  Some of what I wrote is embarrassing to read. I improved and learned from my mistakes, and learned to change my venting into actual creativity. I planned my Sunday discourses, I studied the use of language in the scriptures, and learned more about English from studying Portuguese than I would have any other way. I learned to appreciate the relative ease with which I could express myself in English; it didn’t seem so hard after trying it another language. My confidence grew as the space in my notebooks disappeared.

It wasn’t all song lyrics and poems. I found a balance between unabashed sincerity and structure. I wrote essays without Wikipedia our other sources. I learned to apply logic creatively.

Writing to me is more than a subject in school, or a part of my career. It represents the balance I’ve found between my nature and my desires. I learned that there is room in writing for all personality types and all styles as long as you are willing to embrace your own.

I always wondered what will be left of my father’s career when he dies. A lot of spreadsheets. Money made for his bosses. I no longer see anything dishonorable with his life; he does what is necessary to provide for his family. I hope to do the same, but to have a legacy more human, one that takes all that I am to create. All of my strengths and weaknesses are evident in my writing, and that is why I love it.