I didn’t pay attention in high school English, and 23 caught up with me
Last Tuesday, I got a Slack ping from my manager halfway through my morning shift that made my throat go tight. “Quick favor,” it said. “Can you put together a 2-page summary of the local pop-up outreach we did last month? Just a clear, structured essay, nothing fancy.” I was sipping my $5 over-bitter cold brew, and I just stared at the screen. I stared at the blank Google Doc for 47 minutes — I counted, because I kept refreshing my inbox and Instagram to avoid it — and spilled a quarter of my cold brew on my frayed cat mouse pad I got for free at the county fair two years ago. I knew all the facts by heart: 12 pop-ups, 180 flyers handed out, 47 new Instagram followers, that one candle maker gave me a free lavender candle because she liked how we redesigned her little hand-painted sign for her. But I couldn’t make it make sense on the page.
I never took any of that school stuff seriously, not really. Essays were just an annoying hoop to jump through, something to check off the list before I could leave for the day. I skipped half of 11th grade English to pick up extra opening shifts at the pizza place downtown. I needed the money: I wanted a used Honda Civic that didn’t break down every other week, I wanted to go to Warped Tour that summer, I needed to buy my own school clothes because my mom was working two jobs and couldn’t cover much extra. When I did show up and an essay was due, I copied the first three paragraphs from SparkNotes, swapped out a couple verbs to make it look different, then paid Jake from the row behind me $15 to write the rest. Jake always needed extra cash for vape juice, so he never said no. I got mostly Cs, sometimes Ds, and I didn’t care. I kept telling myself who writes essays after high school anyway? That’s just for people going to fancy colleges, not for people like me who were gonna work retail then move up to office admin, right? I thought I was being practical, cutting all the useless crap that didn’t put money in my bank account.
It’s the small awkward moments that catch up with you, the ones you don’t see coming. Last week, I ended up texting my coworker Mia — the one who writes all our social media copy, the one who’s good at this stuff — and asked if she could fix my mess of bullet points and half-sentences for me. I bought her a taro boba after work, extra pearls, to say thanks. She read what I had, looked up at me and said “that’s all you had? You could’ve expanded this easy.” I just laughed and said yeah, I’ve always been bad at this. I didn’t tell her I bailed on the company’s promotion development program last month because the first requirement was a 500-word personal statement, and I knew I couldn’t pull it off. I told my boss I wasn’t interested in moving up right now, which is a lie. I am interested. I just don’t want anyone to read my garbage writing and figure out I’m faking being a competent adult a little bit.
I lied on my resume, same as everyone else, put “strong written communication skills” right there in the skills section. I can write a text, I can write a 2-line Slack update, I can write a cute Instagram caption for the team page. But anything longer, anything that needs a clear beginning, middle, and end, anything that has to make an actual point instead of just recapping what happened, I freeze up. Last year, after my grandma died, I had to write a sympathy card for her best friend who couldn’t make it to the service, and I spent 20 minutes staring at a blank card, googling “sympathy card examples” just to put together three sentences that didn’t sound like generic greeting card trash. That’s how bad it is.
I don’t have some grand plan to fix this, honestly. I can’t afford to take a creative writing class at the community college right now — rent went up $150 this year, and I’m still paying off my car’s new transmission. I started this weird little thing a couple months ago, though, that I haven’t told anyone about. Every night before I scroll TikTok to fall asleep, I write three paragraphs in my phone’s notes app, just about whatever. What I ate for lunch, how the bus was late because of a fender bender on the main road, how my neighbor’s pit bull always escapes his fence and runs up to me to get pets. It’s not an essay, it’s just practice getting used to stringing sentences together that aren’t full of abbreviations and emojis. Last week I wrote a whole page about the apple picking trip my boyfriend and I went to upstate, and when I read it back, it didn’t sound like garbage. That’s the biggest win I’ve had so far.
Sometimes I get mad at 16-year-old me, like why did you think an extra $100 a week was worth skipping all that practice? But then I remember: 16-year-old me needed that $100 a week. We didn’t have extra money for car insurance, for new jeans when mine ripped at the knee, for the gas to get to school every day. I wasn’t just being lazy for no reason. I just chose the thing that mattered more at the time, and now I’m paying for it slow, a little bit every day. I don’t have a big inspirational ending here. I’m not gonna say I’m gonna be a writer next year or anything. I just wanna get to the point where I can write that 2-page summary for my boss without panicking, without buying someone boba to fix my work. That’s enough for right now. (Word count: 1172)
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