Ice Cream Anyone?

The first novel I ever wrote got me suspended from school for "pornographic" images. I call it a "novel" since, as a child, I supposed any piece of writing that was typed and bound and took more than five minutes to write was implicitly the work of a novelist. My school principal was unimpressed and told my mother that the themes discussed in my book were not supported by the school; therefore, since a parent had complained, he must suspend me from school. My mom criied behind me as I sat in the cool leather seat positioned in front of his huge mahogony desk listening to him read the notebook piece of paper, which contained my pornographic references.

I still was quite confused because the only thing that I knew about the word "porn" was from the caption on an old 1995 Jerry Springer episode. The show was entitled: "You're Too Fat to Make Porn," and from what my eight-year-old self observed, people were confronting these "fat" women about this "porn" issue. I figured it was some type of food they were consuming and making for others, and when Principal Hank Williams pointed out my references to ice cream cones in my novel as pornographic, I figured there must be some sort of connection between food, fatness, and porn.

The whole experience was confusing, and Principal Hank instructed my mother, still crying at intervals, to take me home from school immediately. On the way home in the car, my mom began yelling, "How could he think ice cream cones were a sexual reference? You were nine-years-old when you wrote that. How can he expect a nine-year-old of those kind of insinuations! He's the sick one!"

I wasn't quite sure what sex had to do with ice cream or this porn issue, but I did feel awful I had written my novel nonetheless. When we got home, I dramatically threw the accursed manuscript into the fireplace and watched it burn page by page, crying, embarrassed of being a writer.

I haven't written a "novel" since. Mom said the experience stifled my creativity, and I guess in some ways she was right. I've never exactly felt like everyone else, and kids in elementary school were informative enough to remind me of this. A mom from New Zealand, a Jewish father from New York, and a vocabulary full of strange synonyms like "singlet" or "advert" spoken with an awkwardly strong Philly accent made my first six years in Barrow County, Georgia, an unfair defining childhood. When your best friend compares you to the ragamuffin children dressed in curtains on Sound of Music because your mom sews your own clothes, it doesn't help to make a child feel quite "normal."

This deficiancy in normality produced an insatiable desire for acceptance, and finally resulted in a peaceful, quiet, and eventually joyful acceptance that I was not like anyone else. This realization has made me reluctant to write at times, because, now that I feel so comfortable in being different, it seems inconsistent to be a writer that resembles anyone else. There is nothing special in my writing - no defining stylistic diction or description. How then can I ever expect to be a writer, if I can't get over these inhibitions? For to not be a writer, would be to not give in to my truest passion. And that passivity is inconsistent to my personality. So in not writing for fear of being unoriginal, I violate myself in the most dishonorable of ways and rob myself in not being loyal to my deepest core of desire.

If I do decide to be a writer, then arises the question of what to write. My story, while different from all others, has not those elements that shock readers with their horrifying realities as so many books attempt to do these days. It's just my life, and I feel exaggeration of my life events would be false, thereby still being untrue to my nature. Then, by honesty, I risk boredom in my readers. The only thing worse than not writing is writing a thing that bores and leaves the reader unimpressed (meaning, without any impression being made). A tragedy is this: a life that uses the earth to do nothing but absorb and leave no trace, no residue, no film, dissipating into the air ineffectual.

Therefore, I can only do one thing, and that is take a risk. In risking my vulnerability, I embark on an effort to be true, honest, and pure without compromising my effect as a writer. Perhaps all artists must carefully tread this line or risk losing all credibility and identity in such an endeavor.