About Me

I grew up reading on my parents’ bed, in a makeshift window side nook (my sister’s desk), on my grandma’s couch. I read and listened to stories, written by the Grimm’s brothers, Tran Dang Khoa, Roald Dahl, and narrated by my father. You can say reading has been an essential part of my life for as long as I can remember. I wrote a narrative essay once about the loving ways in which my dad dedicates so much of his life into buying my sister and I all kinds of books, and through that, discovered how much it means to me that I was given so much resource and an appreciation for language from so young. 

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It felt natural to me to start writing. As someone with so many thoughts and way too much opinion on everything, I needed an outlet that would fulfill and stimulate me. I never wrote much about myself though, and I’m struggling to get the words out as I’m writing this paragraph. I have been dreading this for days. What even is a narrative introduction? What do people want to know about me? What do I even want to say about myself? To me, I’m just a vessel that takes in the information offered to me in the world and puts them into words and adds meanings. I do great with a prompt or an inspiration, and I have found myself often just jotting down thoughts about what makes a song so good, or how elements of an essay makes it an emotion-provoking essay. But it’s a million times harder when I have to draw inspiration from myself. I hate open ended questions like “Tell us something about yourself,” or “Give us a fun fact,” and I would be so paranoid as to prepare answers in advance that I use for every situation. I’m left-handed, I’m from Vietnam, I love cats, I don’t like chocolate (I know, I’m sorry). Sometimes, I wish I could just show some magic being all the thoughts in my head and the decisions I have made and the things I have done and they can just summarize my personality in five words for my own sake (I also hate it when I’m asked to summarize myself in five words). 

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I think writing about myself is difficult because I’m so unused to discussing my emotions. I would much rather talk about them in the forms of reactions to something I love or hate. But through different challenges, and especially through the Gateway Writing course, I have learned from peers who are so talented and Shelley, one of the most compassionate and creative professors I have had the pleasure of working with, that writing about yourself doesn’t have to be a simple, linear  “Hey, this is me and these are the ways I see myself.” It can come through the voices you wear when you’re thinking about the things you care about, the choice of words you use, the tones you take. 

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I write for the pretty words. I write to practice the language, the fluency, to visualize the tempo. I love how cathartic it feels to splay my guts out on the pages and see words come together into sentences that mean something. But I hate letting other people see them and therefore me for who I really am. I hate showing myself and being vulnerable without pretense. It’s paradoxical in a way, the fact that writing helps me feel and explore and express, but I can’t fathom being so proud and so free that I let other people in on the fun. It’s terrifying. Reading my past projects, a familiar pattern of what I allow the eyes and ears of others is on those which are supposed to be about me, but ended up circling around the subject of me but never fully there. I would write about poetry rather than writing poetry, or about the way I grew up but not what it gave me. It wasn’t until the pandemic that I really felt brave. I was spending more and more time secured behind a computer screen, working on college applications and cooking up bullshit essays that read as extremely pretentious and didn’t feel at all personal. I was pretending to be someone who would look good for universities, or would attract attention. I remember feeling sick of the whole process, and when it was over, I jumped into writing poetry, something I never felt like I could do, but decided to anyway, because what did I have to lose? I was lucky to meet a friend in high school who took an interest in language and writing the same way I did, and we would share our diaries, poetries, short narratives back and forth. That was the first time I felt like I could really write. I didn’t care that the poetry was bad or the rhymes were choppy (sometimes non-existent). Instead I felt proud for the first time, showing myself to someone else, being vulnerable, no longer taking on a voice that was clinical and objective or a topic that was far away from who I am. 

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I still hate feeling vulnerable. It was only two years ago that I found out that having other people read my narrative and stroll around in my inner world won’t turn me into dust, or a puddle of extreme embarrassment. I don’t feel any better at it than I was two years ago. I still stumbled through this narrative feeling like I want to tear all my hair out, I still feel awkward, I still think I’m sharing too much while being afraid that I’m not sharing anything at all. But I guess all of this is in the name of progress, and this project is my first time really seeing that progress come to life. I’m learning how to express love, and not just discussing love. I’m learning how to edit my thoughts, polish my stream of consciousness, do the tedious part after the expressing, workshop, listen to opinions, redo, explore, start from scratch. All while showing me.