Becoming a Communicator

When people hear that I’m a French and English double major, they usually ask me what I’m going to do after college. They also like to try to answer for me: they ask, “Do you want to teach?” For some reason the only thing that comes to mind when they think of English and French is education. And I can’t really blame them. For most Americans, the extent of their exposure to literature or foreign language is restricted to their experience as high school students, and therefore their high school teachers. But it’s exactly this kind of limited perspective that I want to avoid as I grow up.

So, back to their question: what am I going to do? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that question myself. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. As much as I love French, I am loathe to think of myself as a sharp enough listener to be a verbal translator. I have a long road to fluency ahead of me, and I want to be 100% confident in my speaking skill before I try to use my French professionally. That means translation is off the table – for the time being.

Then there’s English. Writing is a part of me, and I believe that I can use it to my advantage in any career I want. The thing about English that I think is too often overlooked is the importance of clear and effective communication. Having someone who can communicate important and nuanced messages between parties is vital to everyone’s success. I want to be the person who manages that communication to make sure everyone understands what’s going on. As much as I day dream about being a wildly successful and widely acclaimed novelist, I also believe I have an important role to play as a communicator.

I’m not a perfect communicator. I keep secrets. I intentionally mask my feelings through sarcasm and body language. I became instantly embarrassed last semester when one of my departments’ secretary commented on my tone regarding a certain professor. I knew I had to speak about him respectfully, but I was so fed up with him that I couldn’t help but indirectly express my annoyance. It’s better than blurting out everything that’s on my mind, but it can be just as inappropriate.

Managing how and what I communicate has been a struggle for me for as long as I remember. The number of times my parents and other relatives have suggested that I take something down from Facebook or my old blog are a testament to just how hot headed I can be. Over time I’ve learned to think more carefully before I speak and post, often saving myself from embarrassment. Sometimes, though, I over censor myself by hiding my thoughts and feelings from people that matter to me and deserve to have at least the occasional honest peak inside my mind. I’m on a quest to find balance in what and how much I communication, and the process of adequately censoring myself is an integral part of my continual growth as a communicator.

If you don’t believe I’m a communicator, ask yourself what kind of person would write five paragraphs about being one. On a Saturday night. For fun. The answer? Not many.

Still – what do I want to do as a communicator? I'm still not sure, but I'll share a few of my ideas next time.

Playlist

Boston, Augustana

Thunder, Boys Like Girls

Go the Distance, Roger Bart in Hercules

I Miss Writing

I developed a huge part of my identity around the idea of being a writer during the first half of my high school career. Writing became the thing I could point to and say, “That’s mine. I made that.” The most important writing I did was for my blog, Moonwaves iWonder. Keeping a blog meant expressing myself when I felt alone and repressed at the technical school I went to as a freshman, and later as a history of fond memories of friends and family and important events in my life.

I was a true hobbyist blogger, talking about my life and pontificating about the deeper meaning of it all. Occasionally, friends and family would chide me for my posts. They pointed out to me how one sided I could be when describing an issue, and how there are some things that just shouldn’t be posted on the internet. To this day I censor myself when posting to Facebook and Tumblr (though I’m still a bit of a loose cannon on Twitter). There’s something to be said for the voluntary following of other people’s posts and one’s freedom of speech, but I definitely appreciate the lesson my small band of readers taught me. There are a lot of things I want(ed) to write about and share with an audience that I’m glad I have not – because I really doubt I could handle the consequences of those words.

I retired iWonder when I felt it no longer fulfilled those desires of expressing myself, and when I felt that my personal stories were becoming boring drivel that no one would care about but me. To some extent I think it was the right choice. The life of a straight, white, middle class, Protestant boy high school student from Massachusetts, whose life consisted of little more than video games, mediocre cycling and swimming, and internal psychological conflicts, is definitely not the most interesting thing in the world. Internet personalities like Charlie McDowell, Bryarly Bishop and the Vlogbrothers later showed me how to be successful talking about yourself on the internet: by not just being and speaking and writing interestingly, but by doing interesting things. These people start giant charity organizations, create original works and travel to exotic locations for more than just the pleasure of travel. They capture their viewers attention by doing interesting things and telling interesting stories. Needless to say, I wasn’t doing many interesting things in high school.

I could have been telling more interesting stories, though. I can’t count the number of story ideas I had in high school that I abandoned for mindlessly pursuing video games or friends who would never fully reciprocate my desire for companionship. The few stories I wrote weren’t even that good, because I never really put my heart into them (see: my senior project, New Babylon, which was truly awful). Between my lack of writing and my writing failures I gradually lost the desire to write, to speak my mind and to think imaginatively. I would even argue that my writing has become less eloquent, and that it’s lost the unique voice that I once thought I could cultivate into a career. This is all rather sad, the death of an artist and what not, but it’s kind of a serious issue since I’m paying a university to eventually give me a piece of paper that says I’m a good writer.

Maybe I still am a good writer. I wrote all this, after all. And lately I’ve felt the desire to write again – a stirring of my mind that feels like an old friend, my muse, returning from a long journey to embrace me and tell me stories of its absence. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. I left my muse, and now I’m returning to tell it tales that I might write for it.

I am still a writer. Just not the writer I used to be.