Introduction

I am Michael Decker. Right now, I am a first year college student on a football scholarship. I am just getting acclimated to this life, and feeling the weight on my shoulders build. I was thinking today about the difference between this and high school. How high school is where you are on a conveyer belt, getting fed mental and physical food, and college being a conveyer belt, and i am the worker feeding myself of the line. For me, school has always been an important part of my life. Yet, I always felt like I was a laborious part. That the fun came from extra curricular or friends, the school was the barrier. But as of two years ago, in junior year English, writing became my second outlet next to football.

Writing is an escape for me. I can put down everything I am thinking of as if I unwind a ball of yarn. Stretching out into a long line of color. I love reading books, to hear stories and learn how to piece together thoughts in an elegant way. I think that reading and writing to me is vital to me because it is a voice. I voice that can speak long after my tongue can. Like writing, the books I read in junior year were light bulbs, turning on a new thought process. Fahrenheit 451 told me about the importance of reading. It is the microphone that is recorded through the passage of time. I heard a saying once that said, “writing and reading books is the way we can talk to the dead. It is proof that humans are capable of magic”. I often think of that when I aspire to write something.

I write because that voice is a tool that can be used for change. So many famous speeches, laws, novels, and treaties have been force on history. I mostly like the writing that deals with social injustices, or fantasies that have meaning to them. The best feelings I get is when I read a book and think about what it teaches or what its opinion is. Which opens my imagination.

         I usually approach it like a venting. Writing is my orchestra, and my mind is the instruments, all trying to play at once. Writing gives me order to try and conduct it. I then go back and change the spelling and grammar, which I regrettably say is my weak spot. I just love the Atticism and beauty of it. I try and write my own stories after I did very well on a short story we were supposed to write in English this past year, and I find it fun to dive into my mind and see what happens.

         However, I feel like I’m very inexperienced. I don’t often tell people that I write because the things I have done seem embarrassing. That my heart poured onto a paper is for selective eyes only. Maybe that says a lot about students in general. Maybe they are afraid of hatching their comfort egg, making them insecure. My teacher last year gave us freedom to write what we wanted, and do a pretty sizable introspection of what it was we wanted and thought about. It gave me the confidence to see writing in that style more as a art form or healthy activity, rather than an assignment.

         As I learn more about the world and school, I realize how much I don’t know. That is why I am excited about college, because it gives us the opportunity to become more. My experience is very limited, but open.

         Writing has now become apart of my being. I have been only interested in sports for so long, that it is exciting to have something else. It is just another tattoo in my personality. I also like to learn about history and sciences. Some hobbies other than those would be video games, movies, and basketball. I think as my college years play out, another instrument will be added to my orchestra. All I hope is that I can learn to play them beautiful in unison.