The next blog challenge prompt is “What do you like about blogging/writing?”

The short answer is that I like writing because I hate talking.

I don’t like my voice. It is very monotone, and just all around not pleasant to listen to. I spent most of my childhood being mocked by my classmates when I did speak up in class. Part of this was because they didn’t like that I knew all of the answers, and part of it was that they thought I sounded weird. I will never forget when a classmate turned around in his seat and said, “I. NEVER. Want. To. Hear. You. Laugh. Again.” He didn’t. I would go days without saying a word in class.

I also have social anxiety and don’t like speaking in public. The worst job I ever held was as a call center employee doing cold calls for credit card companies–I lasted 3 weeks. My undergraduate degree was in English secondary education, and my student teaching was as an English teacher in a high school. My supervising professor was TERRIFIED that I was going to be eaten alive by these teenagers because I was so introverted and soft-spoken. He was stunned when he arrived to evaluate my progress and found that I was holding my own just fine. However, I did recognize that I preferred smaller classroom settings. I opted to get into special education for my graduate degree, since special education classrooms rarely have over 10 students at a time. There is always a work-around when it comes to social anxiety that doesn’t always involve blatant avoidance tactics.

But boy oh boy, do I love to write. I used to handwrite 20+ page letters to friends and my cousin. Writing 500 word essays didn’t bother me as long as I had a solid topic. Citing sources is tedious, but it is a necessary evil. I express myself best when I do it in a written format. I recently had to get up in front of 50+ people for an event for one of my children. The parent usually gives a brief congratulatory speech, but I told the audience that I write much better than I speak and directed them to open their programs and read what I had written there before I escaped back to the sidelines.

Writing is easy for me. I have plenty of thoughts rolling around in my mind at all times, and they flow fairly easily through the keyboard onto the page. I tend to edit in my mind more than I do on the page, so my first draft is often my final draft. This is a lifelong issue–in high school and college, I would deliberately “forget” a comma or misspell a word just so I had something to go back and correct to appease the instructor.

So yeah, I’ve got plenty to say–as long as I can write it!