To me, reading is second to breathing. Sometimes, I hold my books in my hand instead of putting them in my backpack, so that I feel closer to the stories they hold; I’m a flip away from falling into their worlds. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have a lot of time to read during this past year, and I’ve taken advantage of it, to the point where my mom has taken to shaking her head across from me at the dinner table and saying, “You read too much. Why don’t you go out more?”

Writing, however, especially writing about current events and politics, comes much less naturally to me. I once spent three hours reading about a current event that intrigued me in the New York Times and listened to a few podcasts about it (The Daily, The Economist). I wanted to write a short opinion piece on what I had learned and what I believed should be done next, but it never materialized. The cursor blinked at me from the top left corner of my Google Doc, blipping in and out like the ideas I was trying desperately to tie down and organize. I planned, gathered evidence, and fretted; nothing. Questions arose: Who gave me the right? I’m a high schooler gathering scraps of evidence on the internet; there is so much I don’t know, and I can only capture the broad strokes, parrot what the experts are already saying. Wouldn’t it be best to wait for time to offer some perspective on the situation? I didn’t want to write something overly emotional or cringingly didactic, caught up in the fiery rhetoric that often drives the present moment but is lost upon history. And there was also an element of laziness and perhaps one of perfectionism. I wanted the hypothetical article to have the perfect balance of reason, emotion, historical perspective, and present nuance. I wanted every sentence, every word, to be chosen correctly to serve the purpose of my article with dignity. And with these lofty goals, I never got off the ground. 

After this happened a few times with a handful of current events, I realized that shooting for the stars is not the best strategy if you never actually shoot. I didn’t start out reading Morrison, and I won’t start out writing like Ross Douthat or Caitlin Flanagan. I’ll handle some subjects clumsily and go too far (or not far enough) on others, just as I read Louis Sachar’s Holes and failed to understand, as a simple plot detail, why the spell had been broken at the end. If, in two years, I regret or cringe at or want to expunge forever from the face of the earth something I wrote now, that’s growth. I think regret is a tricky thing, because often the consequences of the mistake that you regret is what gave you, in the present, wisdom to regret it. (Note: excessive moralizing.)

I’m the same in conversation; I love listening to my parents talk about work and the stock market, and I send a news story to one of my friends every other day to ask them what they know and what they think about it. Listening and reading is like an immersion in someone else’s world, so much so that my opinions and political beliefs sometimes sway towards whoever I last had exposure to, whether in conversation or in a book. But I want to find my own voice, however imperfect; I want to keep an open mind, but also to stake out a position and stand up for it; I want to be able to organize and contribute my thoughts to the ongoing discourse, and have faith that even if no one reads or learns from what I say, I will improve so that one day, my writing may prove worth reading. 

In this spirit, I’ve committed myself to writing my next blog about something that happened a couple weeks ago in the world and will continue to have ramifications in the future. This commitment will require for me, first and foremost, to not procrastinate; one of the reasons why I did not write the blog this week is because it’s due 24 hours from this writing. I’ve laid out a general plan for the blog, and I hope that over the next two weeks, I’ll be able to execute it. 

One of the quotes from William Strunk’s Elements of Style that stood out to me was, “Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.” Although I’m not sure if I agree with this in its absolute tone, especially in journalism, a profession that has, at times in our history, driven social change*, I like to remind myself of this quote. I am also my audience. My voice, materialized by my will, shaped by my experiences, and added to the chorus, is enough in itself. 

*For more info, and for those interested in journalism, I’d recommend Christopher Daly’s Covering America: A Narrative History of the Nation’s Journalism. It’s a long read, but its narrative format and preponderance of primary sources and anecdotes made it a page-turner for me.