How a College Professor Pushed Me to the Edge of My Writing

Reflecting on my university years, I'm struck by the strange cocktail of nostalgia and melancholy that fills me.

It was a time of “finding myself,” but also of struggling to fit into a mold I hadn’t chosen. Long nights, the promise of endless possibilities, and waking up with a knot of uncertainty lodged in my chest. There were moments that shaped me, but none quite like the quiet gray room where I was allowed, for the first time, to unzip the smothering persona I wore and become something else: a writer.

Throughout those four years at university, I signed up again and again to take workshops with one professor in particular. Creative Writing 101. Short Story Narrative. Personal Essay. Creative Nonfiction.

Those writing classes were a sigh of relief. An interruption from the persona I had groomed and coaxed myself into.

It was a place where I could unzip the suffocating outfit I’d become accustomed to wearing in front of my parents and classmates. In that small gray room, my pen was free to tell the stories I couldn’t say out loud. It was a world where my thoughts mattered. A world where I could be anyone—a writer, even.

…

Each class, our professor would pull out a printed essay from her satchel and circle the room, her petite frame leaning on the occasional desk for support. I felt shy around her, nervous to be taken so seriously by an adult, embarrassed by her approval of my work. Over the years, I became captivated by her voice—steady, soft, with a slight lisp she’d learned to disguise.

I, too, grew up with rocks in my mouth, avoiding words with 'sh' or 'th' sounds. Though she never spoke about it, I imagined her younger self, much like me, hating the way her voice betrayed her.

One day in class, she read us a short narrative about a woman who had been assaulted as an adolescent. The woman returned, years later, with her husband to the exact spot where the assault had happened, lying face-down in the dirt, showing him the scene. A piece of her was stolen there—a piece neither of them could ever find again.

A hard pit formed in my throat. I wanted to pull it out, to snake it from me like a clump of hair caught in the shower drain, but it wouldn’t loosen. The images her words triggered slipped into my mind uninvited, and I tried to force them back into the closed files where I kept them. Although I’ve never kept a tidy desk, I’ve worked hard to organize that part of my mind with ship-shape cleanliness.

…

The assignment tied to her narrative was titled, “To the Edge.”

It prompted us to write about an obscure experience. A trauma. A secret. Something unresolved. A text that might nudge the reader to the brink of their comfort and force them to peer over the edge, to look into their own fears and confront them.

I avoided it for weeks. Pushed it around in my mind until it was scuffed and worn, an uncomfortable weight. Eventually, hunched over a hand-me-down kitchen table ruined with perfect burn marks from a baking attempt, I opened my laptop and strung the words together. Arranging and rearranging them until they made sense. Slipping into that flow of writing where time bends and warps, and the noise of the world fades into the background.

I hungered for the days when our assignments would be returned to us, her comments scrawled in green ink along the margins. Our "To the Edge" essays were distributed one by one, ensuring privacy. Some students read theirs out loud, relishing the comforting assurance of attention to their wounds.

But that day, when I scanned my own paper, I found a message scribbled at the top: “Come and see me during office hours.”

My stomach dropped.

I dislodged the staple from the paper and pressed it into my thumb, the small sting grounding me in the moment. I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut. I walked to her office door, raised my fist to knock, but the fear paralyzed me.

What if she saw through my words?

What if she didn’t think I was good enough?

I turned and left, sneaking out of the building before she could know I’d been there at all.

…

I signed up to write with her as my mentor, and she replied, “I would love to work with you.” But I stopped returning her emails. I enrolled in a teaching theory class instead, a safer choice.

Even now, I wonder how different my life might be if I’d chosen to believe in my voice then.

Now, on rare nights after spending too much time alone in my apartment, I’ll open the folder that contains those assignments. I’ll reread the guts of my early 20s. Most essays are drenched in angsty sorrow and overrun with adverbs. Some are bold and witty.

All of them reveal something true about who I was at the time. Unsure. Hiding. Eager. Impressionable. I feel proud to have created them. To have known them, and to have shared them with one other pair of eyes. I strive to bear that same vulnerability and hope in my grown-up world.

…

It’s the process of writing that I crave and value the most. The adrenaline coursing through me, its visceral energy. The clarity that comes when raw paragraphs take shape out of nowhere, as if they’d been hiding in the blank whiteness of the screen all along, waiting to be wiped into existence.

Words cling to me sometimes. They rise up when I least expect them—in the shower, during a walk—forcing me to run for paper before they disappear back into wherever source it was they came from.

Teaching can be a thankless job. Educators often don’t see the change they inspire in their students. They aren’t there when, years later, something they said resurfaces and snaps into place in a student’s mind.

But it’s in those moments, when the teacher’s voice echoes through time, that their work is fulfilled.

…

If I could see her now, I’d thank her for treating me like a real adult. For telling me that my voice mattered, even if she was the only one who believed it at the time.

And I’d tell her this:

I’m writing again. The words are mine now—fully and unapologetically—and maybe, just maybe, that’s because she showed me they always could be.