My first website, my first blog post, and my first completed piece of writing. Everything ties together in the end.
I have debated back and forth about publishing this for a LONG time. At first, it was too soon and my thoughts were too close to my heart to publish to everyone. Now, these thoughts seem far away and while it makes it easier to publish, I wonder if it’s nearly as significant as when I first wrote it. Beware: the attached PDF is lengthy. It is my first ever completed work in writing, a collection of essays, poems, and short stories that I completed as a senior project in high school. I called it, “You Can Lead A Horse To Water, But You Can’t Make Him Think,” which I now regret as a title because I think it’s lengthy, cheesy, and inappropriately capitalized. Unfortunately, you can’t change what you wrote so long ago, but you can learn from it. At the time, the title was a symbol to me that there was so much more to life than school. Taking advanced classes in a suburban education system is something that’s really easy to get lost in, and I found myself in that trap. I didn’t find it particularly challenging or rewarding, which was disappointing because school was the majority of my life. Even just reading the foreword establishes this and many other themes throughout the work. When I wrote it, I was establishing my identity and discovering my creativity and ability to express myself. Throughout the work, you can see themes of my struggle with incompetence and the inability to finish projects that I’ve started. As a creative, this is something I struggle with every day. I come up with so many ideas, but I don’t always see them through. This project is significant to me because it’s the first thing I saw all the way through. Another theme that comes up is struggling to accept my privilege as a white male in the middle-upper class. This is something that I still struggle with, and this is a struggle I have never made public (until now). One thing that I want to make clear with this is that I apologize if any of the thoughts I share are inconsiderate or if any of the identities that I represented in the writing are offensive. The biggest takeaway from re-reading my work is that I learned to be more intentional, educated, and thoughtful when writing about identities that I don’t share with my characters. I thought about editing or removing some of these pieces, but I ultimately decided that it was more important to me to preserve the original work and learn from the potentially offensive mistakes of it. I am still learning about identities and getting better with them every day. I encourage anyone who noticed something in the work to engage in a conversation with me and better educate me about that perspective. I can hopefully share my perspective at the time and how it’s changed as well. This is the way we can best learn. When reading the whole piece, I think my biggest strength shows through. In my writing, I show that I have this complex desire to be both creative but also stick to a formula or structure within the work, balancing my left brain and right brain. I think I did a really good job of weaving together all my ideas in a very intentional, crafty way. Many of the stories in this are dreadful, but I think some of them are incredible, especially when you realize they were written by a high schooler. As a whole, I love the work because I think it represents really well who I was at that time. In Meaninglessness, I publish most of my writing exercises, let myself be silly, and write a lot of stories with faux symbols that mean absolutely nothing to me. This was the way I get my creative juices flowing. In Despair, I share my dark side with angsty poems and pessimistic stories representing my biggest fears at the time. In Purpose, I share core values that I found over my time in high school through stories and essays. In the biggest mic drop of the work, I end with some of the longest stories I’ve ever written and the biggest symbol of my completed successes outside of the high school. By the end, somehow all of these ideas are connected as one thing that was entirely made by me. I’m ultimately grateful that I re-read my work and that I’m finally publishing it, even if it’s only on my blog. I learned a lot about myself from re-reading it, and I’m more inspired than ever to continue working on my writing. In publishing this, I’m confirming that it’s the one piece I’ve finished. Putting yourself out there is one of the scariest and most rewarding things you can do. If you took the time to read (the blog or the writing), I greatly appreciate it and let me know what you think. robert h stonik
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AuthorI am a proud creative, U-M LSA employee, University Activities Board at Michigan State University alumni, pro wrestling fan, Detroit sports follower, Nintendo geek, and sandcastle champion. Categories |