Just six months ago, I viewed writing as a chore. Throughout my whole life I hated it and I was never any good at it, which made it even more annoying. Outside of texting, the only time I would ever write anything would be the occasional email to a professor or when required to for a homework assignment. I never practiced writing anything therefore I could never improve upon my skills. Every time I needed to send an email, I would write it up and then ask my family members to look it over, to make sure it was up to par; sometimes I would even just give my siblings a general email idea, then they would write it out for me. I was self-conscious about my writing ability and looking back on it, it makes sense because the last real writing class I took was in my junior year of high school where I wasn’t interested in learning how to write at all, and as a result, I didn’t retain any of the information. I went five years without taking a writing class… how could I have been any good?

This past summer, I was a part of a research internship program and as homework, we had to write weekly journals of what we accomplished, what recreational activities we did, and what we planned to do the next week. This activity opened up my eyes to show me just how stupendously bad of a writer I was. I didn’t know any of the rules and I wasn’t good at telling stories. It’s especially a shame because I’m a native English speaker, yet I knew nothing about writing. Sentence fragments, subject-verb agreement, parallel structure, participles, etc. All of these concepts I’ve heard before, but they meant nothing to me and sounded more like pig-Latin than anything else. For the first few weekly journals I wrote, I kept them short because I didn’t want to make it obvious that I wasn’t good at writing, but after a couple of weeks, I successively wrote longer entries until I ultimately began looking forward to writing them each week.

After I finished up the summer internship, I went back home to Arizona and decided to write my first ever Medium article “How I Ended Up in Lincoln, Nebraska” I knew it was going to be far from perfect but I didn’t let that discourage me, because creating a piece of garbage and continually refining it is much easier than creating a masterpiece. Throughout this process, I learned to enjoy being bad at things because all it means is that you have the opportunity to get that much better. I believe this to be an invaluable lesson in life — you shouldn’t get discouraged when you’re bad at something, instead take it as a challenge to become better; with this mindset, you will be able to accomplish whatever you set your mind to.

I’d recommend writing to any and everyone, I don’t care if you’re a plumber, caregiver, or even a professional fart smeller (it’s a real job) because writing has tons of benefits. The most attractive one is that it’s for your future self. If you write about your thoughts, beliefs, or even just how you’re feeling, then it can function as a time capsule for you in the future. Imagine you’re 75 years old and you come across something you wrote back in your early 20’s, it wouldn’t even have to be anything magnificent but I’m willing to bet that you’d have a smile form across your face as you begin reading it. So do your future self the favor and start writing, otherwise, you will regret it when you’re older.

On top of that, writing is therapeutic. You never truly understand how you feel about something until you write about it and if you don’t believe me, then go ahead and prove me wrong, give it a try. Either way, you have nothing to lose. The only two possibilities are that you’re right and you get an ego boost or you’re wrong and the ball is rolling for you to continue writing. You don’t have to post your writing online either, just keep it saved for yourself. The reason I like to post what I write online is that it’ll be stuck on the internet forever and anyone can read it; therefore, I’m forced to try my best because I don’t want some hogwash to be tied to my identity for the rest of eternity.

Throughout my six-month journey of writing, I have come a long way. I’m not ashamed to say I’m still trash at it but the future is promising. I still do not understand sentence fragments, subject-verb agreements, parallel structure, and participles nor do I have any care in the world to understand them but at least, I am not self-conscious about my writing ability anymore because that’s all I wanted to accomplish from this. I hope my story was able to inspire you readers to start writing and hey, maybe I’ll even come across one of your Medium articles one day.