On writing

I find it very difficult to write; it always has been a thorn in my mind ever since I was young. I was born with sensorineural hearing loss, and it made it quite difficult to pick up a language. When I moved to the United States in 2004, it was one of the toughest periods of my life - I couldn't speak English, and the majority of the cultural transition took 4 years (I wouldn't say I completely transitioned, rather I got stuck somewhere in the middle of the culture barrier!). One of the ways that were emphasized as a learning tool was for me to write in English - whether it be short sentences, stories, and later essays. I hated writing, and especially those essays - just to my luck, I would be assigned them either through school or through my parents to write. It would be so frustrating seeing a blank white page of lines, and expecting it to be filled up with a structure of coherent words. In my mind, words never made sense - the structure of a sentence, or how meaning is created through stringing them together, was never clear. What perhaps was more maddening was these essays were judged in a qualitative manner - it was never quite right, it could always be made better, the flow isn't correct, etc. It drove me nuts - why couldn't it be more like math or science - where things made objective sense, and the answers were either right or wrong?!

Even in high school - the subject that I struggled most with was IB English Literature mainly because of its essay based assessment of literature - our entire two years of learning literature was based on writing two essays - a commentary on a piece of literature, and a comparative essay on two books based on a ridiculous prompt - ex.

Acquiring material wealth or rejecting its attractions has often been the base upon which writers have developed interesting plots. Compare the ways the writers of two or three works you have studied have developed such motivations.

I remember sitting down with my dad trying to learn how the commentary works at night. My English teacher Mr. McGowan had me practice writing small paragraphs of essays and commentaries until I got better. Ultimately, I found a shortcut that got me through the class - I developed a formula, and stuck with it. However, it wasn't enough to score the highest grade, and back then in 2017 - I didn't understand why it wasn't enough, and I left English feeling cheated of a higher grade.

It wasn't until I got involved in research when I realized why English was never judged in a quantitative manner - after all, research is finding out the right and wrong answers to a problem. Scientific results are communicated in an essay format; numbers are simply the skeletal backbone of any good manuscript. The words make the story. Being exposed to grant writing forced me to broaden my views - grants are completely written on theoretical projects or just barely started experiments, it requires imagination and a way of writing to convince an anonymous panel of reviewers to fund your experiment. Mathematics is not computing, its developing proofs to your theorems, and that requires a whole lot of imagination and creativity.

In a larger sense, I found out through research that life and science is not a black and white paradigm. Rather it is of shades of grey and color, and writing is the best way to explore that uncertain region- armed with our quantitative tools. In those three years at Georgia Tech, not only did the lessons of essay writing and the English language take hold, but it also helped me see that life is also not as clear-cut as I thought it was back in high-school. It's much more complicated, with love, loss, pain, heartbreak, fear, anger, anxiety, happiness, etc - I find it so amazing that we have so many words to describe emotions! With me writing this blog, I think of myself, as an explorer, like Henry Morton Stanley, navigating the jungle of adulthood through words - and there is no shortcut to an emotionally fulfilling journey - Adam Sandler portrayed that pretty comically in his movie Click!

And of course, it's still difficult. After all, I am trying to put my life which I experience in 5 dimensions of senses, into a one-dimensional format of language! But now, when I stare at the blank white screen, instead of being frustrated, I find it as a way to live in the many shades of grey and color.

*I know it's about 4 years too late - but thanks Mr. McGowan for really pushing me back then!