Teens these days.

(Photo: Carol Kaliff, Hearst Connecticut Media)

Today kids across America walked out of school to protest gun violence and the inability for our government to pass common sense gun control.

That’s incredible. I can only imagine being a government & politics teacher, or any other branch of history/American studies, and witnessing your students actively participating in and organizing peaceful protests. Or deciding not to participate because they didn’t agree with the protests. Either way, it’s a teach by doing moment. It’s teaching kids to be actionable instead of simply memorizing facts or spitting out theory.

Facebook is flooded with posts of alum, teachers and parents talking about the school walkouts or walk ins, where assemblies are being held in memory of the students killed due to gun violence. CNN is live-streaming the walkouts and the words of our CT Senator Chris Murphy. Across the nation kids are holding up signs stating their beliefs and desire for the adults in charge to be actionable. They are no longer complicit and trusting that adults will get the work done. The Parkland students showed them that their voice matters even when they are unable to vote. That you don’t have to wait until you’re 18 to voice political opinions.

I was young for my grade and didn’t turn 18 until I was in college. I remember being furious that I couldn’t vote in the primaries that year, even though I would be 18 by the general election. I was always highly opinionated when it came to politics, thanks to my mother who was always a well-informed citizen and my brother, who walked into the Democratic Headquarters at 16 to start volunteering. I would tag along with him, making calls to remind democrats and independents to vote, checking in on our elderly residents to see if any needed rides to polls, attending Chris Murphy’s debates when running for Congress, joining the Young Dems chapter my brother helped start and my favorite part of the process: going from poll to poll on election night to watch them count then ending back at Headquarters or a restaurant to hear the results roll in. I couldn’t vote, but I was more engaged in the political process than most adults.

Which was why I was furious when adults would undermine my intelligence in my teenage years. I would often hear that my opinions, and the opinions of my peers, were just echos of my family’s beliefs. I understand the thought, and recognize that may be true in some cases, but I could never understand why my civics teacher would take so much time explaining our nation’s workings to us, only to tell me that my opinions were just something I inherited from my parents when I got in a fight with a classmate over Bush’s reelection. Of course my family influenced my beliefs, but I was also smart enough to research and act on my own. I was old enough to hold opinions.

I remember a car ride where my mom and brother were talking a politics. I listened without much input, thinking instead of my recent civics lesson on political parties.

“What if I’m a Republican instead of a Democrat?” I asked my family.

I was constantly the lawyer of the family. I always wanted to think about situations from a different angle. A contrarian, always thinking of the other side before agreeing with my family.

“Your beliefs line up with the Democratic Party,” my mom replied.

“But what if they don’t? What if I’m a Republican instead?” I asked.

“Then you can be a Republican.”

I went home and did all the research I could on both parties. I spent hours trying to understand the difference and political platforms. I weighed policies against my moral beliefs and found that I did side with the Dems.

All of this was done my freshman year of high school. Clearly I was already intelligent and thoughtful enough to question my beliefs and recheck them against my political affiliation. My thoughts and opinions haven’t changed much. They evolved slightly with the times and my maturity. Whereas I used to think we should eliminate marriage entirely, calling everything a civil union, so we can eliminate the religious context of marriage, I’ve realized that battle gets misconstrued and calling everything a marriage is a better angle. I used to be much more fiscally liberal that I am today. I used to be pro-choice under medical necessity but am now entirely pro-choice. Tiny tweaks, but my adult mind is still in line with my teen mind.

So I still get angry that I was always underestimated. That adults did not believe that I researched my policies enough. To be fair, this still happens. I was constantly accused for siding with Hillary instead of Bernie because she was a woman, when in reality I thought she was the most qualified candidate we ever had and her fiscally moderate policies enabled me to reap benefits while still covering costs of social security and welfare.

People may say that I was a different type of teen. That not everyone was as mature. Well then, why not teach them to find their own opinions instead of dismissing them?

I think adults fall into an awful habit of thinking kids don’t know enough. We talk down to them and assume they can’t possibly understand. But clearly they do.

Today’s teens are living in a world where any question they have can be answered in a matter of seconds on their phones. Teenagers are actually MUCH better at recognizing “fake news” than we are. Aside from their obvious increased technical literacy, they’re also taught how to seek out information. As students, they have access to online encyclopedias and academic research. They’re constantly being told not to trust sites like Facebook and Wikipedia, and instead fact check every piece of information they want to use. They’re writing research reports and getting graded on whether or not their facts are confirmed. They’re much better at finding the truth than we are.

Without the ability to vote, I believe they’re getting antsy. I remember talking to my cousins, just shy of 18, about how much it sucked to be unable to vote in such an important presidential election. And now here we are, with massive school shootings happening at levels that I can’t even comprehend, and they’re done with us adults. They can’t vote, but they can speak for themselves and remind politicians that they’re voting very, very soon.

We need to stop underestimating kids and instead listen to them. That’s how I treat the kids I babysit. I never want to influence their own moral and political beliefs, so I just listen to them and encourage them to think about where they stand. The other day a kid I babysat was doing a project on trans kids and I found that she knew way more than even I did. I offered no opinions and instead just let her inform me on the topic. When I was watching some younger kids, someone came to the door who was running for local office. What followed was an hour long conversation with the kids about what their platforms would be and how they can run for office within their school. While I would steer at times, like suggesting they invest in scientific research when they said they wanted to stop all hurricanes, I let them carry the conversation.

We invest so much time and money into our kids and their education. But often when they want to show us the results of that investment, we don’t listen. While what happened at Stoneman Douglas was horrific, it is inspiring to see the students use their voices and speak up for themselves when a politician is dismissive of their question. Unless you’re a teacher or school employee, the topic of school shootings will ALWAYS impact the kids in your life more than it will ever impact you. Empower them to use their voices, especially if they’re teenagers. I’m so proud of these teens who are speaking up for the students in Sandy Hook who are still too young to speak for themselves. There are no longer only parents representing their students, but students themselves being actionable.

Keep going teens. Stand up for what you believe in and know that your mind is worthy of respect and your opinions are worth being heard.

I don’t believe in writer’s block.

I don’t believe in writer’s block.

I had a writing teacher a few years back that was the first person to tell me there was no such thing as writers block, there are only lazy writers. It changed my outlook on the writing process.

The only time I really felt a true writer’s block was when I wrote poetry in high school and had to meet weekly deadlines. Sometimes I felt too uninspired to write, which is especially hard when you’re trying to write within a rhyme and rhythm scheme. But thinking back, I don’t think it was that I had writer’s block. I think I was just never taught how to write.

In school, they typically teach you everything you need to know about structure. When taught to write, you learn how to write through the lens of learning a format and using correct grammar. You’re taught how to edit more than anything – learning to avoid comma splices, run on sentences and how to keep tenses consistent. Then you’re taught how to cite work and format quotations. It’s more about composition than content.

So when I sat there not knowing what to write, feeling like I hit a wall, it was just that I didn’t have the proper training for pulling out content.

Writing slam poetry helped with this. In my senior year of high school, we had a poetry class that took up the entire year so there was room for learning every type of poetry out there. I loved slam poetry and spoken word. As a performer, I enjoyed the ability to perform at a higher level. As a writer, I loved the freedom to write in any style you wanted. It wasn’t so much about format as it was about the way it rolled off your tongue and captivated an audience. Instead of feeling the pressure of generating an idea, I was able to write my thoughts down as they came then go back and piece them together. Many times I found that there wasn’t much editing to do because my words came out the way I wanted to speak them. I would come up with an idea, like “wow, I really have senioritis” then go from there. It usually evolved into something more profound than I could have expected. My senioritis thought became a satirical poem about poetic structure. Doing my homework at musical rehearsals got me to start a poem about our warm up dance which became a metaphor for my dad’s accident. I loved writing freeform, or within the genre of spoken word or slam. It allowed me to follow the flow in my head instead of forcing myself to seem sophisticated enough to write a sonnet, which never fit me.

While I rarely write poetry anymore, I wrote over a hundred poems that year, and I believe that writing style contributed to my current writing process. I usually start with an idea, sometimes as insignificant as what I ate for lunch that day, and follow the thought until I land on something that I find interesting enough to expand.

Content never runs dry. There’s never going to be a point where there’s absolutely nothing left to write about. So in that capacity, I can’t see how writer’s block can exist. If you find yourself uninspired, you just need to write through it until you find the path again. In my current book, there are so many non sequiturs that I know I will edit out because I found myself at a point where I couldn’t think of what to write next. But it’s much better to keep running on, knowing that you may be writing junk, because it’ll lead you back to your story.

But there are times when we doubt ourselves and recognize that what we’re writing is shit, so instead of just continuing to write, we pause and let our doubt creep into our heads for long enough to come to a complete stop. Then we don’t know where to go because we turned our motor off. We call it writer’s block, because it’s easier to put a name on something and blame it on a universal outside force than to admit that it’s really our self-doubt and the easy remedy is to keep writing until you find yourself again.

I believe that writer’s block is the excuse for a lazy writer. I’ve been that lazy writer countless times. I just had a year long dry spell. I’ve been at the point where I lack the motivation to go through the process. Where the product I want to create seems so insurmountable I can’t bear to start climbing. I’ve looked down the tunnel and thought “nope, I’m perfectly fine sitting outside.” I’ve thought that the stories I want to tell are dumb and uninteresting and that I lacked the talent to put them to words. I’ve written five pages of about ten different books then jumped ship before I invested too much time. I stopped writing an idea because I got lost in the formatting of it. I fell out of love with characters while developing them and have countless maps that will never be surfaced. I’ve had days where I did my full writing prep routine: took a nap, a long shower, cleaned my apartment, got dressed, took time with my makeup, poured myself a glass of wine, grabbed my laptop and went down to my lobby, fully intending to write, only to be happily distracted by the first neighbor to walk by and abandon my piece after two pages. My incorrect grammar stared at me through my creative ideas, taunting me and telling me that I’m not fit to be a writer because I don’t remember every rule of the English language.

But that is all self-imposed. It’s not the lack of the ideas, it’s the unwillingness to do both the mental and physical work to write through the doubt and uncertainty to find my way back into the rhythm of writing. Writer’s block can’t exist because you can literally write about anything. What you did during the day, the cup next to you, a dream you had… there’s never a lack of content, there’s just the laziness to get started and the unwillingness to trust that your directionless start will end in something meaningful.

In the book I’m writing now, I’m taking a different approach than I typically do. Since it’s a story about my life, I already know my characters well. I remember the setting and the content comes easy. So instead of spending a month in book prep only to jump ship before I even start writing the book, I’m just writing. I’m getting everything I remember down, then going back and expanding, formatting and reworking until it is as composed as I can get it.

I recently became obsessed with Stephen King after reading “It” and “Misery”. I read an interview where he mentioned that he finished all his first drafts within three months because it doesn’t give him enough time to sit on his ideas and decide that they’re junk. When you have a such a short deadline, it’s harder to take the time to sit in “writer’s block” because you just have to finish.

Writer’s block is nothing but our unwillingness to put pen to paper. We need to stop using it as an excuse for being a lazy writer.