How Being An ESL Student & Fiction Erotica Shaped My Writing
Where it all started.
ESL (English as a Second Language) and Fiction Erotica taught me a couple things.
1) There is power in labels.
Being an ESL student fueled a hidden desire in me to want to be really really good at making sense and have a really really big vocabulary. The former I was able to nurture in my late teens/early twenties. The latter has since become a flex.
2) Read ahead to stay ahead.
Class read-alongs gave me anxiety. Real body-aching anxiety, and over my primary years I learned to read ahead to pronounce every single word in my head to a) not sound dumb 2) to calm my anxiety. Moons later, this coping mechanism of ‘staying ahead to prevent anxiety’ grounds me in valuing strategic planning & development.
3) Write passionately, or don’t write at all.
My mom would drop my sisters and I off at the Menlo Park Public Library at 8am and wouldn’t pick us up until after 5pm. There’s a lot that an 11 yr. old can get into, and finding the adult fiction section of the library was perhaps the most transformative. This was my first encounter with passion. I shouldn’t have been in grown folks business like that 😂 and I served my time already (1 day suspension in 8th grade for finding fiction erotica books in my backpack) but boy did it teach me about the power of passion and leaning on the reader’s imagination to tell the story, too. ⚔️
ESL (English as a Second Language) and Fiction Erotica taught me a couple things.
1) There is power in labels.
Being an ESL student fueled a hidden desire in me to want to be really really good at making sense and have a really really big vocabulary. The former I was able to nurture in my late teens/early twenties. The latter has since become a flex.
2) Read ahead to stay ahead.
Class read-alongs gave me anxiety. Real body-aching anxiety, and over my primary years I learned to read ahead to pronounce every single word in my head to a) not sound dumb 2) to calm my anxiety. Moons later, this coping mechanism of ‘staying ahead to prevent anxiety’ grounds me in valuing strategic planning & development.
3) Write passionately, or don’t write at all.
My mom would drop my sisters and I off at the Menlo Park Public Library at 8am and wouldn’t pick us up until after 5pm. There’s a lot that an 11 yr. old can get into, and finding the adult fiction section of the library was perhaps the most transformative. This was my first encounter with passion. I shouldn’t have been in grown folks business like that 😂 and I served my time already (1 day suspension in 8th grade for finding fiction erotica books in my backpack) but boy did it teach me about the power of passion and leaning on the reader’s imagination to tell the story, too. ⚔️
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