Do I even know how to write anymore? I’m beginning to realize that maybe I never did. As with everything else, writing is an instinct I have, and a skill I never truly developed. I was naïve to think I was good enough not to develop it. Mike Sager told me a long time ago that I was “green,” and I couldn’t understand at that time why that was so obvious. I get it now, thank you law school. My writing hubris stems from the fact that I just about refuse to harness my thoughts when I write, so that paragraphs are often scattered, and sometimes without much purpose. When I edit, I naturally edit only the grammar and spelling of a paragraph, but I’ve always been too stubborn (*lazy*) to read over what I write and deliberately edit my content. Legal writing has forced me to do all of these things, and the learning process was painful. I absolutely had never done it until this past year, which means that I was not forced a single time in undergrad to confront myself as a writer and improve my writing capabilities. A few professors tried to give helpful advice on my essays – it’s kind of funny how often I’d ignore them. The stubbornness of youth. The fear of being cut down. Now I know I have to get cut down to build myself back up.
Every lesson that law school has taught me I wish I’d learned in undergrad – it would have made the post-undergrad rejection of my writing samples a lot easier to swallow. Each one of the professors I had at UCI taught us about the particular genre of writing that headlined the course, but not the writing skills used to write for that genre. In fact the only professor that attempted to teach writing skills was Mike Sager, and we all thought he was being a pain in the ass at the time. It’s important to understand genres, but I’d have rather focused on how to construct a powerful paragraph. Maybe it wasn’t their fault though, maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. Undergrad was a hectic time mentally. I was just trying to keep myself together every quarter, without really focusing on academics. But I realize now I have a lot of regrets, and that I might have taken a different path post-graduation had I paid more than superficial attention in the classes I took.
I do remember learning about a man who had a piece of his brain removed, who lost all of his long term memory. He could remember only one day at a time, and he would wake up each day and write in his journal that this day was the day he had his breakthrough, that it was the first day he felt like he was truly seeing life for what it was, that it was the first day he was truly living. Everyday bore the same exact entry. My memory is just fine, but I experience similar thoughts on a daily basis. Each day, at least once a day, I discover a new angle with which to look at life, and with this insight I think: this is the first time in life I’m thinking clearly, the first time I’m seeing life as it is. Each time this happens, I shun the outlook I had in the past, and I call myself a fool for thinking the way I did. This is a Russian tendency, to think yourself constantly stupider before than you are now (see Dostoevsky; see Dinara Safina). I’ll try harder now, to keep my head out of the clouds, and to pay attention to the present.
