The assignment didn’t seem hard at first.

A personal essay, very short at around 2-3 pages, and all I needed to do was talk about my identity. The topic wasn’t anything special, it wasn’t anything hard, and I certainly thought that it wasn’t anything that I couldn’t tackle. I thought that because a huge part of my identity was as a writer and because I dedicate so much of my time writing and evolving and creating stories, that this assignment would be easy.

To put it bluntly, that turned to be extremely untrue. I discovered that because I am a writer, especially one that has always feels the need to please people, writing about my identity would be one of the hardest things because I don’t know what it’s like to write for myself anymore.

I remember as this Saturday afternoon I would be continually writing and deleting, writing and deleting, and eventually, I was left with nothing but a blank screen. I had wasted an entire hour and a half doing nothing but erasing the things I had created, leaving me at square one.

I didn’t understand what was happening. I didn’t understand why my brain was shutting down when I needed it to work the most, why I was unable to create a two-page masterpiece that would amaze my teacher and more importantly, make myself feel proud. If I was a writer, why was I having such a hard time? Why was it so much easier for me to create something new, something completely different than to tell a truth about myself? Why, out of all the things I can dream about and of all the other worlds, characters, places, and journeys I have written I could not write a story about my own life?

It was then that I realized that it was simple. It is because I aim to please anyone and everyone and in that, I fail to be myself.

The thing is, I have known this for years. I have always known that the reason I always shy away from writing about anything in my life is because unlike my fictional worlds, I feel confined to both the truth and the logic in my life. I feel limited in my control and power, unlike when I write my fictional stories. And the thing is, I can’t change the things that have happened in my life. I can’t change how people have acted or make up something about me because otherwise what would be the point of this essay? My life would be nothing but lies, a work of fiction.

But I knew ever since I was six and I saw a light in my parent's eyes when they read a story of mine that I would forever try to be different, to be special, and most importantly be someone through my stories. I wrote not for myself, but to please others and as I evolved as a writer, especially now, it was getting harder to reach the standards I set for myself and the standards that others have set for me. I thought that without my writing it is almost as if I am no one, with nothing good to offer to the world. Writing is the thing that sets me apart, it is both the reason I am still here and the reason that I am actually not here at all, and it was only this Saturday afternoon that I realized how much of myself I have tried to bury in order to create something new.

I realized that my writing had become something that I did for the public. Instead of writing for myself and writing about my life I had turned it into something for me to use when I needed to please someone. I had lost myself in trying to create different people, and although that may have been the point in my fictional work I now realize that the longer I continue to write only to please others the more I lose my own ability to tell my own story because there’s going to be a day where I can’t reach anyone’s expectations anymore. There’s going to be a day where someone looks over my work and says it’s unoriginal, that it’s trash, and the moment that day comes I know that I can’t take it as a failure on my part, but as a way for me to climb higher.

So this Saturday afternoon, I knew what I had to do when I sat back down again to rewrite this. I knew that writing this kind of essay wouldn’t be easy and in fact, it had already proved that it was very difficult but it was the thing that I had to do. Writing this essay, even though it was required for my class, was also something that I needed to do in order to start digging up my own story again.

     This is what I needed to do.