All throughout high school, I didn’t care for school. I never wanted to be there, and I hated most of my classes. As a matter of fact, any chance I had to skip or sneak out of school I would do it.
I was passionate about writing, but I felt like such a fraud for some reason. I don’t even really know why I did. I had one class that I loved, and it was more for the teacher than the topic. He taught current events and he was different from every other teacher that I had ever had. He was a bit bombastic, but he really taught us how to be critical thinkers. You never knew where he fell on the political spectrum, and he never taught us what to think.
I got over my fraud complex a bit in that class and put forth some effort into a writing assignment he gave us. It was definitely a half-assed effort, but the teacher was very complimentary – which was a big deal. He didn’t hand out trophies to everyone and he was hard to impress.
But it wasn’t until I got into college, and I took a class on creative writing that I began to trust my own madness. It was a small class, and the professor was young and fun. She encouraged us to color outside of the lines and to trust our abilities as a writer. We had these weekly sessions where we read each other’s work and had to give constructive criticism.
I don’t know what I thought was going to happen in this class, but it never dawned on me that other students would read my writing in class – and actually talk about it. That probably would have dissuaded me from taking the course! But I stuck with it because I really liked the professor, and the class was a mix of really different people.
On our first assignment, I struggled with getting my ideas onto paper. I knew that kind of story I wanted to tell, but I was terrified of judgement from my peers. I was afraid they would think my writing was too dark or really messed up. But finally, after spending hours trying to make the writing more socially acceptable, I said fuck it, and I just wrote it like I felt it and told the kind of story I wanted to tell.
Once I handed out copies to my peers, I thought to myself, okay, this is it. I wonder what kind of feedback I am going to get? Am I going to get kicked out of this class?!
Looking back, it is so funny that I had these insecurities, but I did. I also happened to be at a time in my life where I didn’t exactly see myself as a good person or very creative. I had a lot of negative self-talk and as it turns out my view of myself and my writing didn’t jive at all with how the professor and students saw me.
In our first reading and critique session, I was shocked at the reaction from my peers. There was some constructive criticism, which really helped me improve. But overall, the students loved how gritty the writing was and the vulnerability of the characters. It turns out that the strange, dark and mysterious things I liked to write was actually interesting and compelling. At the end of the class, the professor asked me if she could use my assignment as a sample for her other classes. She said she wanted the other students to know that they can trust their own madness with their writing. I couldn’t believe it and I felt so encouraged.
After this class, I took a Shakespeare class because the same professor was teaching it. She encouraged me to take it after I told her I just didn’t get Shakespeare’s writing. That semester, I ended up falling in love with Shakespeare and the language. I was so invested, I even got my husband and family into it. We went to see Richard III at Yale and I found myself reading more than what was assigned to us.
When it came time for the final, we had a huge paper that we had to write on Henry V. The professor encouraged me to write it in the voice I had developed in the creative writing class, so I did. And as I wrote it, I “trusted the madness”. In the end, the professor called it a graduate level paper and asked to use it as another sample.
That year I ended up winning a writing award and got published in a small local publication…I also entered a writing contest online and out of hundreds of entries, got an honorable mention. I never thought for a minute that these things would actually happen for me! But they did because I said fuck it and trusted my own madness. And that year I learned that I might actually be able to write fiction for a living.
We all have gifts and talents that can impact the people around us, or even the world. It would be a shame for those things to remain untapped. Like Steve Jobs as said, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” They are the ones who trust their own madness. And they helped create the world we live in today.
Trust the madness inside. You have something to offer the world and you cannot afford to live in potential for the rest of your life. Â
