The following is my final essay for the writing class I took spring quarter of my sophomore year. The prompt asked me to reflect on my identity as a writer and thinker and chronicle the ways it’s changed throughout the course of my academic career.

My relationship with reading and writing is a tumultuous one, laden with questions of my identity and values and the stark differences between the person my twelve-year-old-self daydreamed of becoming and the person I actually grew up to be. I am from an intellectual household bursting with books, music, and fine art, and this environment set the stage for the kind of life I felt I needed to live. I was surrounded by people who exceeded every metric of success: my mom is well-known and influential in the collegiate community, professors at Swarthmore and Stanford were frequent dinner guests, and one of my babysitters was an Olympian as well as a star student. This was my world, and from a young age it was simply a given that I would one day join it, not as my mother’s daughter, but in my own right.

My relationship with reading began with extreme hatred. I remember being forced to incorporate reading elementary books aloud to my mother into my bedtime routine. Eventually when I became proficient, I started to discover the other worlds that books offered me. I became wrapped up in tales of magic, princesses, and distant cities. I was drawn to intriguing plots and captivating mysteries, and eventually I started to love books not for the act of reading, but for the escape. After fights with friends or my parents, I would retreat to my bedroom to cool off with a chapter of The Magic Tree House or A Series of Unfortunate Events. I used books like a bomb shelter, waiting out the dangerous tide of my overwhelming emotions until I felt calm enough to reemerge from their pages and resume social interaction.

My frequent reading expanded my vocabulary, which led to adults paying more attention to me when I spoke. My intelligence became a tool I abused for a morsel of praise. Maybe if I adeptly employed a word beyond my years, a teacher or other adult I admired would be surprised and impressed and offer me the approval and validation I so craved. When I was about eight, I read an entire chapter book in a day for the sole purpose of proudly announcing to my family that I had done it. School became a stage for proving my aptitude and distinguishing myself from my classmates. I wasn’t satisfied until I established that I was the best—the best student, the best writer, the teacher’s favorite, and the smartest. That was the only kind of person I believed to be worth being. I became what David Foster Wallace calls a SNOOTlet, capable of only one mode of communication. Kindness for my peers was replaced by judgement for those who I saw as not being able to keep up with me. Respect for those who I believed to be smarter than myself turned into jealousy. Everyone became a rival and a threat to my success.

What was most confusing about my feelings on school was that it wasn’t solely an act. I did genuinely enjoy learning, reading, and writing. Writing in particular was a fun and interesting pastime, and I had moments of glee from finding the perfect word to express my thoughts, crafting beautiful and eloquent sentences, and properly using a semicolon. In high school I started numerous short stories and shared the first pages with my English teachers and parents, eating up the positive feedback and then never finishing the stories. I developed a passion for Latin and mythology, and I spent years reading about supernatural beings who were somehow more flawed and human than we are. Learning a dead language isn’t exactly practical, and my motivation to do so was mostly my curiosity (but I also gleaned a sense of pride from studying something for the sole sake of knowledge). I was fascinated with translation—how a single word in Latin could convey what required an entire sentence in English, or how many words had multiple meanings that allowed for various interpretations of the text. I loved epiphanies sprung from the pages of a book, and that wonderful, illuminating moment was often worth the hours of a brain-numbing search. I adored words; I loved knowing their archeology and where they came from. I fancied myself a seducer of knowledge, patiently coaxing each informative trinket out from forgotten hideaways. But even learning Latin was somewhat about the recognition it offered me in a very small community of scholars. I participated in competitions and won awards for my knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, mythology, and my skill in certamen, or Latin jeopardy. My desire to be praised for my education simply overshadowed the fulfillment I received from it. I loved learning just enough to justify the intellectual lifestyle I had chosen.

A string of apathetic and mediocre English teachers in my junior and senior years of high school led me to switch my focus from the humanities to math. Reading became a passive activity, and I felt math engaged me in a way that reading and writing couldn’t. I spent less time on English homework, skimming assigned readings or simply relying on SparkNotes, and doing as little work as I could to still get good grades (I had to get into a top college afterall). All my assignments blended together, and now, seven years later, I struggle to remember them. The only essays I remember are the few I enjoyed writing. The piece I most loved was an essay on Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser. The minimum page count was five, but I wrote fourteen. I spent free time working on that essay, and I loved struggling to find the best phrasing for my thoughts and the glee of finally discovering it. I was most proud, however, when my English teacher pulled me aside after class and told me it was the best high school essay he had ever read. During the rest of high school and even into college, I’d reread that essay when I felt insecure academically to remind myself that I was, in fact, a good writer. I’d wonder at the masterfully argued thesis and beautiful phrasing and feel the comforting echo of the praise I received for them.

As I continued to cut corners in my classes, I slowly began to realize that the characteristics of intellectualism and total fulfillment from learning I had valued my entire life were becoming less important to me. I didn’t want to confront that truth. Whenever I thought about how I no longer lived for school and how maybe I should rethink my decisions, I fearfully tucked those doubts away into the back of my mind. I told myself that I was just going through a phase of apathy due to high school being understimulating. When I got to college, my passion would surely reawaken. It was, after all, what I had been looking forward to my whole life. The University of Chicago, an institution known for valuing learning for learning’s sake, seemed like the perfect place to get my spark back. I wrote admission essays on how passionate I was about learning, channelling the feeling I remembered from when it was true.

When I got to UChicago, I was uninterested in most of the academic writing I did. I didn’t really care about Hamlet, and I had already read the Odyssey too many times to count. I started to get more interested in a cappella and graphic design, and I frequently skipped class and procrastinated on work to do those activities. I blamed my difficulties on a challenging transition and mental health problems, ignoring every sign that told me I was in the wrong place. After all, I had been told since I was little that I’d go to a “top” college, so this was where I was supposed to be, right?

When finally forced to confront my feelings on scholarship by my increasing depression and plummeting grades, it became apparent that I was no longer who I thought I was supposed to be. I had this romantic idea in my head of growing up to be a Latin professor and finding my bliss within an obscure two-thousand-year-old poem. I wanted to find joy in spending hours writing some important paper while perched in a leather armchair in my office in an elite liberal-arts college. And though I had glimpses of happiness from translating Catullus and Virgil and the self-aggrandizement that came with the purity of learning for learning’s sake, it wasn’t enough. I was violently unfulfilled. I had believed that I was learning for the pure sake of acquiring knowledge, but it was really to provide me with a sense of self-worth.

For so long, my whole identity had been wrapped up in intellectualism, academia, and a love of learning. When I discovered that I didn’t value those characteristics as much as I felt I should, the image of myself I had in my head shattered. I became, in my own eyes, someone who simply wasn’t worth being. I was stranded in the no man’s land between the kind of person I believed had inherent worth and the person I actually was. I couldn’t define myself without the crutch of intellectualism I had used for so long, and I was too scared to try and define myself in any other way.

It took two years off from school to convince me I needed a lifestyle change. Slowly rejecting everything I had ever valued, I started to ignore the thoughts of what I felt I should do and began following my instincts. Eventually mustering all the courage I could, I transferred to Drexel to study graphic design. I gave up my place at an elite university to study something vocational, something twelve-year-old Chloe could never have predicted.

As a graphic design major, I don’t do a lot of writing. Most communication in the design world is oral, and we are evaluated on how well we answer questions from our peers and professors and whether or not we give a convincing argument for how our design would be the best solution to a client’s brief. Most of the writing I do for my major is informal exploratory list-making: brainstorming facets of a design or composing word-association lists to aid in the development of a logo. I also have a blog where I post about design and school, and the occasional times I write a new post have been enjoyable. However, it was actually the required freshman writing courses, which focused on autobiographical exploration, that somewhat reignited my interest in writing. I had encouraging professors who praised my abilities, fulfilling my desire to please and impress. At the urging of one professor, I became an intern at the Drexel Publishing Group, writing two to three blog posts each week about language and student life. I began to feel like I was getting back into the swing of things.

I’d say I have a mixed relationship with writing now: sometimes it feels like a chore but other times I’m really passionate about it. It’s hard to tell which feeling I’ll experience at any given time, but I think it has to do with how personal the writing is. After going through the process of completely reforming my identity, I enjoy self-reflection. I started revising this essay around 3:00 and I recently looked at the clock after working without pause and was astonished to discover it was 9:30. Predictably, my favorite part of writing this essay has been the self-reflection and the search for the right words to convey my thoughts. There is something so satisfying about having your feelings reflected back at you in print. It makes them more real.

I’m happy and fulfilled now, but I still occasionally experience a twinge of the what-ifs. I wonder what my life would be like if I actually were the person my twelve-year-old-self aspired to become. I know I did the right thing by coming to Drexel and studying graphic design, but I still have to remind myself that I’m okay with the way my life is turning out. After twenty years of defining myself as an intellectual, I’ve had to rebuild my identity into one centered on being a good friend, my creativity and passion for design, and my newfound courage to follow my heart (as cheesy as that sounds).

I expect my identity as a thinker and a writer to continue changing, and I hope I return to loving it as much as I used to. Even when I haven’t enjoyed writing, I’ve still considered myself a writer. I have become a writer through my hobby of reading, through classes I hated taking, and through the somewhat rare pleasurable essay. I have become a writer by falling in love with words, both beautiful and grotesque, and the nuances they convey. Words are the one uniting element to the story of my relationship with writing, staccatoed with eras of enjoyment, boredom, and hatred. And now, words are what keep me coming back for more, ever hopeful that the next experience will be one I cherish.