The Chemistry of Writing

“Measure the enthalpy change (to compare the amount of heat produced) when burning different types of alcohols.” It was an experiment I decided to do at the end of 2018 in chemistry class, although I had no idea how to carry out such thing. All my classmates had their experimental companions, and no one seemed to want to work with me. I remember a chemistry professor who bullied me in every class and once asked out loud who was going to conduct an experiment with me. All I could think of was utter humiliation. Why did I do this to myself?

Chemistry was one of the three subjects in this course, the Science Access to Higher Education course in college. Along with biology and psychology, the big three would help me become an optometrist in the future. I desperately wanted to be the one. I worked at opticians for good few years, but the only way I saw for myself was to be at the top. Optometrist is the most valued position in every optician. He or she as an eye practitioner, not a physician, can prescribe or recommend any eye-related medications. My eyes were always weak, but the position occupied by this person was almost equal to God's. There were also equally high responsibilities. I liked it. For the first time in my life, I wanted to feel needed, respected, appreciated. I've had enough of being a perpetually sick person, and that's how the rest of the world has often seen me, and still does.

I already had a bachelor’s degree in humanities from my country almost ten years ago. Unfortunately, it wouldn't count towards the optometry I wanted to study. I had to start all over again, and I was too old to study my A-levels, so Access was a shortcut designed in a very specific way to complete the course in just one year. Very intense. Very unhealthy. Very harmful.

You see, I've never been a scientist. In my country, I never had to do any experiments, and as far as I remember, my physics female teacher was a drunk, so that made the grade for all of us. Almost zero learning, zero comprehension, zero stress. We all passed with one major degree of amnesia on our certificate. I don't remember a single chemistry class. Math was on and off, and in high school it became unbearable to listen the professor talk mostly to himself. It wasn't the equivalent of understanding.

And yet I had no problems passing math on the GCSE course I started in parallel with that thankless Access course. Maybe because the teacher was French and that helped me because I absolutely love France and French culture.

The GCSE course was intended to help me get the English language requirements and consisted of two parts, English and math. I had to work part-time too, so I felt like the busiest person in the world since I was a teenager.

And one quiet evening it happened. After a long, windy day with traffic jams, I was struck by inspiration as I walked out of English class next to a six-foot wall. When I got home after a few minutes (I was lucky enough to live near the college), I wrote down the words that became the beginning of my first book in English. These words also enabled me a few years later to enter the University, from which I dropped out for purely materialistic reasons.

I felt that something was wrong from the very beginning on this Access course, but I also felt that I had to grin and bear it. I tend to take everything on a psychological level. And if you were me, you'd have to survive too. And if I was constantly humiliated in chemistry and biology as well, it meant a warning in my head.

I passed psychology because I felt it was my subject. I had it in humanities, and whether I wanted it or not, I studied it all my life. Of course, it wasn't my intention to discuss my personal life in a class forum, but I was free to write academically, which I did very well as I watched the rest of my schoolmates struggle to put words to paper. I've never had a problem with it. Although I do remember that I kind of confided my sad life to some girl whom I thought I could trust because she too told me all the gory details of her still young life. She became the leader of those students who avoided experimenting with me in chemistry class.

I guess now I have to thank her for that. I don't think I've ever studied optometry anyway. You know what I did especially in chemistry class, where we often had to wear a lab coat and follow strict rules, and all the chemicals and the multiple periodic tables on the walls resembled a rainbow? I memorised. But not formulas, but the colours of the walls, the behaviour of people, the phrases, the way they dared to share their immoral personal lives in a class forum. It seemed like work to me, something interesting to do (or rather: I was reminded of it in this class), and few people who are not writers find writing totally boring. There is still much to do.

My inability as a scientist stunned me, stung me, dragged me deep down, where I could see what is really important in my life and what is really starting to form. Writing in English. And then Vocal came my way, an unpaid internship where I hone my craft. There's always a time like this in our lives before the main course, right?

To add more to the scientific puzzle, before I came to England I had finished (yet unpublished, not sure if I ever will) one book for adults and one for young people in my native language, and a plethora of bilingual poems.

My main purpose in coming to the UK was to earn money to publish my books, but that's bullshit because if you take yourself seriously, the publisher pays you to deliver the product – a completed book. Instead, I gained so much more – a new life.

Now I only do experiments in my brain for my own and the rest of humanity's enjoyment. The fog of those student days has been sufficiently dispelled.

Now I carefully measure every, even the smallest substance, in order to achieve my goal and not miss the most important lesson that life taught me then:

Even the tiniest thing can change the course of the future as you never know when the tiniest thing may become the greatest.

*

First, I wanted to sincerely thank my college English and math professors. They captured the imagination like no other, and also deprived me of the pre-agreed references I asked for a few years later, desperate to become a British citizen. More obstacles, more resilience. This is the motto of a new writer with a new life.

Secondly, I wanted to thank you Kendall Defoe for the inspiration for my story, which has been hidden in the recesses of my mind for some time. It has to come out one way or another, and I'm glad it did in this story.

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Thank you for reading!