The Personal Side Of My Writing: Why I Write What I Write.

I remember and feel so vividly those times as a teenager when the pain and rage and confusion was so strong that it exploded from me. My anger was bottomless. My journal entries from high school were so foul and full of rage that no Young Adult publisher would ever dare print the raw truth of them. I screamed at the world in so many ways. I fought an invisible foe; a foe I wasn’t mature enough to exactly know, and a foe that would end up nearly killing me.

I know that foe now, and coming from a person like me, you’d think that foe would be my teachers. They failed me because I dropped out. They couldn’t teach me. My administrators didn’t care, didn’t work hard enough, didn’t do their jobs. They had it out for me. I was a black eye to an elitist school. As in SKATE, I was explicitly asked to leave. But….

The foe was not them.

The foe was spite, and spite is one of the hottest burning emotions we have. As a teen, I would bleed a gallon of blood to draw a drop from anybody who crossed me, and it hurt me more than it ever hurt them. I wasted four years of opportunity, but in the end, I learned something about myself that my father had buried deep in me. Self-reliance. Too late for school, but not too late for life.

My father’s father was old school to the hilt, and so is my father. My background is three generations of business owners, and simply put, you do for yourself in this world. For me, this stubborn and wonderful independence, along with my learning style, was a concoction for disaster. In speaking to my dad about my schooling, he’s very blunt. Just like his father, he never put much stock into school for preparing people for real life, he didn’t trust them with his boys, and it was only a means to an end. Get your diploma, open your business, and work at what you love.

Self-reliance.

You’ll find a theme of self-reliance in every book I write, and it’s a very tricky thing to portray without bagging on school. Any good teacher goes to work every day to make this world a better place, and should be regarded with respect earned. Any good principal runs his or her school to help students find knowledge. But just like life, and just like students, within those monikers you’ll find good and bad, excellent and inept. They can be overcome, though. They are the human side of a sometimes inhuman institution.

For some teens, myself included all those years ago, it isn’t the teachers or the administrators that are the root problem.

It was the system itself. I simply was not built for it. My personality, my style of learning, my almost instinctive reaction to challenge authority. The collective learning process never fit me, and my teachers can’t be blamed for that. Yes, many targeted me. Yes, I dished it back. And yes, I provoked it once the battle lines were drawn. But it wasn’t them. It was me. Give me a rule and I’ll feel constrained. Tell me what to do and I’ll resent it. And you.

Know a student like that? Bet you do. There’s a lot of them.

But there’s another side. I’d like to think that if even one English teacher, any one of the many who could see that I wasn’t a typical learner, had said, ‘I don’t care what it is, just give me your best story. Read any book, write about it and I’ll grade it’ that I would have buckled under and opened myself to them. God knows I had math notebooks full of stories. I read voraciously in high school. And even up until the day I dropped out, underneath all that attitude and anger, I was silently screaming for somebody to believe in me. Don’t tell me what to do, tell me what I can do, then let me do it. But it didn’t happen, and it’s unrealistic to expect a system steeped in rules, curriculum and collective policy, outnumbered thirty to one, to take each child aside and individually cater to their learning style for the duration of his or her education. It’s impossible sometimes. So, what does a teacher do with a kid like me? What do parents do?

I was taught in school that school was the key to success, and when I didn’t succeed, I felt exactly the way I was supposed to. I was a loser. I was stupid. I wasn’t worth it. But with my personality, and that ingrained independence in me, those feelings quickly changed. They were the stupid ones. They weren’t worth it. And I’d be damned if I didn’t spend my time showing them just that.

I look back at all the things I did that hurt me, and I still feel the pain. But why did I do them? Did I want to become a teenage alcoholic? Did I want to steal booze? Run from the cops? Did I want to be a high school dropout? Did I want to get high and risk addiction or overdose? Did I want to live life as a poor, jobless and self-confessed loser? Did I want to torment my loving parents for four years? Dishonor my father? Of course not. I was drinking and smoking and skipping and failing because I had control of those things. I don’t know how many times I was asked why I was making my life so difficult. Why? Because it was the only thing I had control of, and it was because I saw my education as their responsibility on one side, and not needed on the other. And all of those rules, regulations and minute parameters proved it. Heck, I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without being told it was okay. Resentful? You bet. Needless? Oh yeah.

So I wrote SKATE about self-reliance. About making decisions based on Ian, not the world. Not based around the hated teacher, jerk principal, control freak coach or dysfunctional parent. I write about believing in oneself, because I know that once you do, all those stupid rules might still be stupid, but guess what? The bitterness over them fades.

That’s why I write what I write: because I know what it feels like to be lost in a place where you should be found, and I know what it’s like to make mistakes.

Sincerely,

Mike