Weekly Writing Challenge: Rebellion of Minds
February 2006.
I’m still a grade school student back then and our lives just revolved from playing hide-and-seek near our school’s football field and making my time efficient by reading books and newspaper in our library if I have spare time. It was the point in my life that I read all newspapers, borrow all books, and try to understand Wall Street Journal. Curiosity has led me to something productive today.
We only had one grade school publication and its content is nothing but student-writers boasting their achievements and poems made by students who were forced by teachers to do it. Our department has several students with creative minds and I wanted them to share strange or great things from their head by writing it on a cartolina. My allowance before is just a dollar a day and I try to save more so that we can buy more cartolinas and writing materials. I sacrificed buying toys just to write and compete with our official school publication.
Writing without permit in our school is a very serious offense and our papers are always confiscated for that reason. We tease and criticise our classmates in our paper but no one ever got angry to what we were writing back then. The more we insult them, the more they will like it. That is part of our brotherhood in our school. Forget the rules as long as everyone is happy.
I remember my first article: a fictional story about my classmate who was killed in a stampede. It’s a very weird story but everyone liked it and soon, we received more clamor to write more funny and interesting articles. Most of them wanted us to write a story anything about them.
November 2012
I’m now a freshman student in college and it’s been 6 years since I wrote my very first article. In terms of the subjects of my article, I have dramatically matured from insulting a classmate to opening the eyes of our readers today. Writing now became a leisure for me. Someone up there gave me the ability to write and it’s up tom me to hone that ability into a skill. I’m not a perfect writer and I know I commit grammatical errors on my articles. What I think, I write directly. My frustration from our school-sponsored magazine refusing to publish more creative articles has led me to produce my own article which led to the creation of this blog.
“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.”
-James Baldwin
