About Me

Below is an excerpt of a personal statement I wrote for a class, The Art of Blogging. The piece describes my relationship with the written word.

“If I win this spelling bee, I’m going to spend all my prize money on bacon,” my competitor flirted at the girl next to him as only a middle school boy can. This was going to be a cakewalk. After a grueling, three-step competition during which I bested my bored, uninterested opponents who just wanted the school bell to ring, I had finally made it to the big stage: the Westchester County Middle School Spelling Bee.

I wasn’t just going to win this tournament; I was already preparing for a career in spelling. I daydreamed of Scripps Spelling Bee trophies, magazine profiles, and speaking circuits where I lectured on the importance of asking the judge for errata like a word’s language of origin.

As I approached the microphone, I made eye contact with my mom, who was seated toward the front of the all-but-empty auditorium. We are the readers of the family. This was my chance to pay her back for all the hours of my childhood that she spent reading colorful stories like Ferdinand and The Very Hungry Caterpillar to me. I was going to make her proud.

“Your word is ‘accelerate,’” the judge intoned.

“Uh, ok,” I stammered, “X-c-l-e-r-a-t-e.”

The buzzer screeched its disapproval.

“Oh, uh, accelerate. I forgot you have to say it after. Accelerate.”

The judge, who also happened to be my seventh-grade English teacher, had to intervene. “No, Joseph. The correct spelling is ‘a-c-c-e-l-e-r-a-t-e.’ Accelerate.”

Written words, some of my oldest and most consistent friends, had betrayed me. When the spelling bee ended eight rounds later in a five-way tie, the bacon aficionado was still on stage to receive his share of the winnings, while I was crying in the back seat of my mom’s car.

Like many other introverts, I seem to have an uncanny mental recall of embarrassing life events like that infamous spelling bee. While I struggle to remember my friends’ birthdays or my neighbor’s name, I can relive in the utmost detail every voice crack, date rejection, and missed layup I’ve endured. As I replay these horrors in my head, I often think of the verbal flub I should have better annunciated, brutal comeback I should’ve retorted, or compliment I wish I had given.

Written words help me re-establish footing in a life that sometimes just moves too quickly for me. When I am feeling lost, I can’t flip life back a couple pages and live it again like I would a confusing novel. I can’t practice things 100 times before they really count as I do when I write a speech. I don’t have five minutes to plan out the perfect response in conversation as I do when I’m texting. But in those situations when I am reading, giving a speech, or sending a text, I am in control of the timeline. I don’t take the pacing passively, I decide it.

Writing has become a way for me to better understand my past, present, and future.

In the spelling bee, the word “accelerate” went from friend to foe as it travelled from the judge’s page to my ears. It no longer offered control over the pace of my life. The word’s safe, familiar curves and lines gave way to disorientation—they suddenly made me feel the way I felt when I met new people or played in sports games. Tongue-tied, upside down, stuck in the mud.

As I have gotten older, I have gained responsibilities and found that retreat cannot always be my first resort. While the safe world of a twice-read book or Twitter feed may seem like the solution to the madness, I have watched papers stack into miniature towers on my desk and found that they do not simply go away, no matter how hard I wish they would. With more goals and fewer hands to hold, I need to confront challenges as they come. However, there is still room for the written word.

Writing has become a way for me to better understand my past, present, and future. When roadblocks recur, I am better equipped to handle them. By writing about embarrassing, confusing, or traumatic events, I can find common threads that unite them. Whether I write a journal entry, personal essay, or short story, I get the chance to relive important moments at my own speed. I learn how to approach challenges proactively, and to process emotions that just feel like a massive, undefinable “bad” in the moment. I have learned that words need not mean escape to bring me solace.

I’ve also learned how to spell accelerate.