Not Even A Week In: Why I Love Vocal

I’ve been writing for a very long time. I can’t say that I’m the very best, but I can say that I have improved since I first started, and I’d like to think that counts toward something. I’d get points for that, if that’s how life worked. It is what motivates me onward, after all. It's a tactic often used to complete a bigger goal, isn’t it?

Baby steps are what allows you to keep note of progress. Otherwise, it’s too easy, painfully easy, to be blinded and overwhelmed by what’s supposed to be our passion, and that kind of agony isn’t to be underestimated. If we don’t have a passion, we find ourselves wondering what our place in the world is. I’ve been there myself more recently than I’d like to admit, and boy, is it frustrating.

Thanks to Vocal, I’m starting to pick myself up piece by piece again. To at least try.

I remember back in the first grade, when my teacher was hanging up each student’s work in the hallway, I had a stack of paper that tape couldn’t handle the weight of. It needed constant attention so nothing would end up on the floor, and eventually, our para had to give up altogether. In other words, their last resort was having me choose my favorite work to hang up with the rest of the class and I got to take the rest home. Of course, then, half of our paper is a picture and the writing we do jot down is two inches tall per letter, but it was a lot for a young child, I suppose.

This was the beginning of the criticism. Looking back on it now, I definitely consider it flex that I already had something that I loved to do when I barely even knew the world around me, but at the time I didn’t see it that way. Young kids are judgmental, in the sense that they say what they think without a filter, and I got a lot of them to tell me that I was a show off that only did what I did because I was trying to outdo everybody else. That wasn’t true at all. The truth was, I took advantage of my favorite subject as much as I could, because I knew that in a brick and mortar school, the very much not-flexible schedule wasn’t going to give me the freedom to do that.

It’s as if I needed it to survive, even before I was ten.

Then I grew up, and I found out the hard way that that wasn’t even the worst of it. In 4th grade, my marks told me that I wasn’t any good at what I loved, and my teacher gave me the impression that I shouldn’t be trying. 5th grade was a repeat -- and that’s how it was for a while, but I was doing my best to turn their unbelieving attitudes into the push I needed to prove them wrong, which no one should have to do, especially someone who hasn’t turned fifteen yet.

I thought 8th grade would be a turning point for me. My teacher loved my work, she praised me constantly, encouraged me to enter competitions, and she helped me to search for further opportunities. Even though nothing ended up clicking and I had to learn to face the rejection that every aspiring author faces, it was okay because at least for the first time in forever, I had someone who believed me. Someone who backed me up in chasing my dreams. Someone who anchored me when nobody else did. I always vowed that if I ever did get what I wanted in life, I’d make sure to contact her and credit her for how much she helped me keep my head up.

And then in 9th grade, everything fell apart. I got put in a different class with a different teacher, and that teacher told me everything that my elementary school teachers weren’t saying, but implying. She said it directly to my face. She wrote some variation of it on every assignment I turned in. She told something like it to my parents when she bumped into them or during parent-teacher conferences.

By 10th grade, I was so burnt out that I dropped out of school. I had to focus on my mental state more than pleasing a careless teacher five days a week, as much as our education system hates that we do that and as much as my counselor labeled me as a lost cause for choosing to stay away from college. I ended up getting my GED, and I had all the time I needed to pour myself into online platforms that would allow me to share my writing.

That came with hurdles of its own. I was knocked down again and again because I attached myself to a website, which I will not throw under the bus, that seems to prefer pieces of work that had thousands of grammatical errors in the first chapter or that revolved around the same trope over and over, a trope that I didn’t want to cave into and give up my own originality for in hopes of moving ahead. Somehow it got into my head that success had to come from this platform, thus setting myself up for a so-called failure too many times than anyone would deserve. I genuinely thought that I can change the standards and squeeze my way in using my own style and writing what I wanted to. It took me three years to realize this wasn’t going to happen.

Thank God I did eventually. I cannot stress that enough. It’s been a couple days short of a week since I discovered Vocal. I did hear of it a while back, but I didn’t actually give it a shot. I read over a couple of other people’s work, loved them, and pretty much forgot about the platform entirely for a while. Now that I returned, I learned fast that this was the program for me.

I’ve been everywhere, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever felt this strongly that I’m at a place that truly celebrates writing. That’s what writing deserves. It deserves to be celebrated, in whatever kind or in whatever message that it brings. It’s meant to be moving and meant to touch the heart, but it stings to find out that in more places than not, this is watered down by a typical love story with stereotypical characters that are admired for the face more than their actions or the plot itself.

Yes, I’ve seen those certain “the plot” memes, and I find them funny. I even feel for a lot of them, but even so, writing is wasting away, I think, and the best versions of it are usually references to things that have already long existed. If you genuinely sit and linger on the idea, it seems to me that writing should’ve improved and grown more than it has. Heck, we have cars that can pretty much drive completely by themselves, and writing both movies and books still revolves on having a good-looking cast or describing the characters to be some dang sexy beasts.

Here on Vocal, writers are respected for writing whatever they choose to write. They get the chance to have a voice for subjects that matter to them, and they get to be known for standing up for what they believe in, sacrificing nothing to be true to themselves while they do so. This is where writers have power. They are finally able to change the way people see the world, or they can place entirely brand new worlds into people's minds. We officially have the strength to turn the ugly or the average into the beautiful, darkness into light, and pumpkins into carriages. We, after a long wait have a place to escape when real life becomes too much.

We can change people. Put magic in them, like we've always wanted to do. We can make the world less scary, and we can travel to places we've never been, places we assumed we'd never imagine. Our hearts no longer have to contain themselves and we have no reason to bow our heads in shame for having a desire to speak.

No, I'm not where I hope I can be one day. I'm still dreaming bigger than the place I am right now, but I do wish I had found Vocal a long time ago.

I would've found out how to be brave and confident a long time ago, too.