Shana Lynn Schmidt, LLC

Notebooks full of my writings shoved under my bed in shame. I was ten, maybe twelve, years old and I wrote love story after love story without any idea about love or stories or writing. Sitting here now I can still see pages full of chapters and I can see the blank pages that followed. Stopped cold in a wash of shame and vulnerability.
As I entered high school, and then later college, my writing was turned into lessons and graded for content and accuracy. If I close my eyes I see myself sitting in the high school library looking at all of the books on the shelf that I so badly wanted to dive into. I can feel the wave of frustration and anger wash over me as I was reminded to only choose a certain genre for my term paper. I held the index cards between my thumbs and fingers with a list of incredibly boring book suggestions and I felt my desire to write slip away. That desire was being controlled, shaped, and ultimately graded to be of worth or good enough. The form of the list, the checklist of tasks, and teacher’s instructions barked across the room as we students tried to simultaneously choose a topic of semi-interest while making sure no one else had chose the same. I can still sense the fading of my brain and creativity as I wanted so bad to spend an entire semester writing yet was required to study and dissect someone else’s brilliance.
What once felt like an escape turned into work. The free-flow of ideas reduced to topics and assignments left to be graded for perfection and intention left to be judged by another. My left brain battled with my right brain until it won the war.
As college turned into grad school and grad school turned into a career my writing turned into case planning and documentation, all creativity and joy lost.
It wasn’t until I sat down to write my memoir that I felt the joy and freedom of the creative process abound. The guiet of the writing session. Calm radiating from my body without any sense of direction, judgement or forced topic.