A Retrospection

This coming Saturday, I will be graduating.

Not from university. I diverted from that traditional path long ago. Rather, I will be graduating from the certificate program I have shared with you here, the written storytelling one at the Woodneath Story Center. Though I won’t be in attendance (it’s Shabbat), and though I still struggle with discussing my being a writer with others (even on this blog), I feel a sense of accomplishment that perhaps I need to give more attention to than I am.

As part of my curriculum, I needed to write an exit essay, and I thought it might be worthwhile to share those musings here because there may be some of you, like me, who have struggled with pronouncing who you are in a public space where it doesn’t feel safe to be true to yourself.

I have found, though, that usually by being brave, by doing what is terrifying, you find that safety—or confidence—within yourself.

A little over a year ago, I wrote about what I had hoped to gain from attending the Story Center’s Written Storytelling Certificate Program. It’s tempting, but I’m not going to read what I wrote. A part of me wants to be surprised when I read it after finishing this exit essay, only because I feel like its cheating to know what I wanted to gain compared to what I actually gained. Then again, perhaps my hopes and my opinion of the ensuing results will align?

What then do I think I’ve gained?

Throughout the course, I attended multiple workshops which allowed me to practice my skills as a writer. Perhaps it was seeing the proof in the pudding that those classes proved to me I even possessed skills to refine? Or was it learning about the various resources that are available not only through the Story Center itself, or other institutes like it, for aspiring authors like myself? No, maybe it was reading William Kenower’s Everyone Has What It Takes for my book report. What if it was connecting with others who are likeminded to me, who share similar dreams, aspirations, and desires of being a storyteller?

I think to know what I have truly gained, I need to first consider how I was transformed by the course. As my rabbi always says, “Education is not about the transfer of information, but the transformation of the student.”

Was I transformed? I think…yes.

While I could say, “All the above,” to my earlier rhetoric with varying degrees of truth, I think the most important, most valuable, trait I have gained is something far simpler, but just as influential, if not powerful, as anything else in whatever list of criterion I could create, for in it lies that vital ingredient of transformation.

I have gained confidence.

All the aforementioned elements of this program have given me the support I needed when before I was so very alone in my pursuits. This course strengthened the foundations I had built for so long in isolation, it allowed my confidence to blossom and grow into something I can claim as part of my storytelling, as a part of me.

A few years before starting the program, I had announced I wanted to be a writer to the world through my blog (a necessary evil to develop a social media platform to help usher me forward into the ever-ephemeral embrace of publishing). Except even after that, I still felt…icky about telling people I wanted to be a writer; never am. I felt as if my inherent need to be a storyteller was something to hush up and sweep under the proverbial rug, something I was almost ashamed to admit, revealing it only to my closest confidants.

But now? Now I feel emboldened. I am a storyteller. It is as naturally a part of me as saying I am a brunette.

This confidence is not something anyone can learn in a classroom. It is one of those elusive traits which can only be caught, not taught.

And I think I have caught it.