More Than You Wanted to Know About My Mother

            For the near entirety of my short life, my mother has insisted to anyone in earshot that I would be a writer one day. On the off chance that I shared any intimate detail of my life with her she would immediately rattle off five different ways that I could turn it into the plotline of the next best seller. Needless to say I quickly learned not to divulge too much to her. For some reason, she could not make the distinction between creative and essay writing and assumed that because I was relatively proficient at the former it meant that I would be capable of analytical brilliance in high school. Coming home with less than perfect grades, I was met with not disappointment but genuine confusion as to why I had not wowed my teachers the otherworldly talent she claimed I had. The combination of her overconfidence in my abilities and my adolescent resentment toward her led to my overall distaste for writing until recently.

            Throughout high school I applied myself minimally in my writing, becoming to anxious at the thought of failure to actually live up to my potential. The longest paper I was assigned had a seven page minimum requirement and it was the closest thing to torture that I have experienced thus far. I had chosen to analyze Slaughterhouse Five, a favorite of mine, but quickly decided it was a mistake. I found it painful to have to analyze the book based on the parameters of the assignment because I ended up with a paper whose ideas did not reflect my own. There is also a chance that I struggled so much because I was a senior on the brink of graduation but we may never know.

            While some people claim that procrastination helps them to work more efficiently on tasks, all it really does for me is give me severe heartburn. I normally work slowly over the allotted time in order to let my ideas take shape organically and to combat the crippling anxiety that consumes me during any and all writing assignments.  I find it nearly impossible to write anything without a Pandora playlist in my ears and even now the Strokes accompany me as I write. My mood plays a major role in selecting a soundtrack for an assignment and I argue that the overall product of that writing is largely influenced by that music.