I used to have the preconceived notion that creative nonfiction was boring. A section of the bookstore filled with dead presidents, aging politicians, celebrities fresh off scandals (see Martha Stewart, see Britney Spears), former child stars (see Macaulay Culkin, see Jennette McCurdy), or socialites who seemed famous simply because they had money or slightly more famous parents (see Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie). Much like the self-help section, it never interested me.
I didn’t want to read about the real world any more than I wanted to live in it.
I had enough scandals to last a lifetime. I didn’t need to borrow anyone else’s. Enough small-town infamy to shy away from other people’s tell-alls (see: my mother burned down a building to spite her husband; see: my father’s DUI records).
I was a fiction writer, primarily young adult, until the dystopian boom slowly collapsed and romance became the reigning trend. Now I read romance because returning to books about seventeen-year-old girls makes me feel like I haven’t done enough with my twenty-nine years of life.
Though I’ve certainly survived enough, I only ever saved myself.
I like the smut, but more importantly, I like the storyline. I like knowing there are badass adult women, kicking ass and having epic romances. I’ve dabbled in writing romantic scenes, but it felt like I was writing about two teenagers having sex, and that doesn’t sell—except maybe to other teenagers. That wasn’t the audience I was writing for.
I’ve dabbled in poetry here and there, mostly as a fill-in therapist during the off-seasons when the panic attacks have become mostly dormant. But I still wake up at two in the morning crying because of something my husband said in passing, or because of a perceived lack of intimacy that sends me into a tailspin. Or I write about the trauma that gave me an ACE score of nine—which would have been a ten if one of the questions had asked about male perpetrators too. Despite what the statistics say, my mother was the primary physical abuser.
I’ve only published one poem. That doesn’t make me less of a poet. Publication is a receipt, not proof of existence.
I took nonfiction classes during my undergraduate studies. I wrote about my life. I strayed from the harder truths that made my peers stare wide-eyed in horror, and I chose to keep a bit more to myself in the next essay. Apparently, they weren’t my audience either.
I once wrote a personal essay during my sophomore year. It began as a list of core values. Most students wrote numbered lists: 1. Don’t steal. 2. Be honest. 3. Whatever other unoriginal thought the wannabe accountant sitting next to me could come up with.
But I wasn’t most students.
I showed up with three pages of paragraphs about how and why I lived my life the way I did and how it altered my worldview. A soul list.
I settled on the topic of developing courage because we are not born with it. I learned this firsthand, and painfully, which is why I commit to being brave whenever possible. It’s why I have a tattoo on my shoulder from Veronica Roth’s Divergent, a book I read three times in a row at seventeen that permanently altered my brain chemistry.
“Selfless to be brave and brave to be selfless.”
I would mutter the brave bits to myself whenever I let fear get in the way of living. When I stood on a narrow rock formation thirty feet in the air, suddenly afraid of heights but even more afraid to shimmy my way back down in front of everyone, I repeated it until I finally jumped into the rough, dark-blue water below.
But that wasn’t really the type of bravery I was talking about, though it all falls on a spectrum.
I wrote about getting pregnant and having a baby at fourteen while living in a world of uncertainty, with a father preparing to go to jail and a mother freshly out of one. I had to learn bravery on my own, not just for my survival, but for my child to thrive.
The word count was 2,000 words, which never felt like enough space. But I wrote it, turned it in, and then my professor handed it back and said the next draft needed to be 1,250 words.
Make it as perfect as possible. This is the final draft.
So I did.
It was the first piece of writing I ever felt truly proud of. I came to class beaming, and then he said, “I lied. Take this draft and give me an actual final draft of 750 words.”
I was livid.
How could I tell a soul-mending, epic story of bravery in just 750 words?
Later, my professor pulled me aside and told me to keep the original draft in my back pocket because it was something special. This was merely an exercise in cutting unnecessary words.
But I liked words.
I hoarded them.
I hate editing for the sole fact that it requires cutting out overly wordy parts. Not because I want the word count to be extreme, but because each word feels like a steppingstone leading me to the final place I need to go.
So, while I loved the writing I did, I hated the process of reducing myself for someone else’s expectations. I decided then that nonfiction was not my genre and never gave it much thought beyond what was required to graduate.
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At the age of twenty-two, I was a stay-at-home mom to four kids with a GED, who had never spent a day in high school and couldn’t get out of my head what my father always said about my mother:
“She has the mentality of a thirteen-year-old because that’s the most education she has.”
But what did that make me?
I was an avid reader who dabbled in arts and crafts and was good at it, who meandered through notebooks full of half-finished stories and socialized with my children more than adults.
When my father talks about his daughters, he goes down the list but always skips me until the end.
Sassion, who was beautiful, eccentric and played the drums (who he misses most because she moved out at seventeen and hasn’t spoken to him in years).
Katelyn, the soon-to-be doctor (who got a nursing degree and realized she hated it and still waits tables).
Alexis, the baby. The athlete. Strong-willed and hot-headed (stoner).
And then me, Savannah. The one who had so much potential before she turned fourteen and got pregnant. No mention of what an amazing mother I am. No mention of my travels across the country while living in a bus. No mention of the life I built from scratch.
In his eyes, do I have the mentality of a fourteen-year-old, like my mother, who never went back to school despite earning a GED?
Perhaps that’s why I stressed myself into having perfect grades and a 4.0 when I graduated with my associate degree.
The one and only time—until years later—that he came to visit me after moving away six years earlier.
Perhaps that’s why, even though I was exhausted, in the middle of a divorce, and suddenly a single mother, I jumped right back into school to earn my bachelor’s degree, publish my first novel, and win a handful of writing awards. Why I graduated magna cum laude and again stressed my body and mind to do it.
Or why, once I finished, I went to graduate school, got published seven times in the span of a few months, maintained a 4.0, and now sit only weeks away from beginning another master’s degree after being accepted into one of the nation’s top low-residency programs.
Because I didn’t want to be at the bottom of the list anymore.
I didn’t want to be described by the one person who was supposed to love me unconditionally as someone who had, in fact, lost all her potential.
When did I stop believing my life was something to hide and start believing it was something worth examining?
Part of me feels there is a sliver of truth in all of this, but I stopped pining for his attention years ago.
Because the truth is, I love what I have done and how I got here.
Call me a navel-gazer (see: a boy named Adam from my graduate program who once told me that writing about my accomplishments was, “and I hate to say it, a bit… navel-gazing”), but the fact remains that I am here because of the choices I made and because I climbed out of the pitfalls my parents left behind.
Because twenty-two is not too old to start college.
Because sixteen-year-old me, enrolling and wanting to become a midwife, then seventeen-year-old me wanting to become a drug rehabilitation counselor (I absolutely could not), was still searching for the thing that had been staring me in the face all along.
It took me twenty-two years to find it.
The literary quotes tattooed across my skin should have been the first clue.
Writing and surviving are two of the best things about me.
At my master’s graduation last week, my favorite professor—now friend—Candace Walsh had my husband and me over for dinner.
She greeted me with a hug, popped a bottle of champagne, and offered a toast with her wife and my husband gathered around the table.
My parents did not come.
She opened the door to creative nonfiction for me a year ago, and I have never felt more seen, more supported, or more encouraged than I have in this chapter of my life.
In a graduate feature article written about me during commencement month, the headline read: “Graduating Graduate Student Found Her Genre at CWU.”
That could not have been more accurate.
After I practically begged her (though I didn’t really have to convince her, but came fully prepared to) for an independent study during my final quarter of graduate school, Candace told me not to see her as some kind of guru. At the dinner celebration she threw for me, we laughed about that conversation. I told her she had blown my entire world wide open.
She smiled and said, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”
I’ve never had something hit me so squarely in the chest.
I felt it in my bones.
For most of my life, I chalked up anything good that happened to me as luck.
The right place. The right time.
Because it is easier to call something luck than it is to admit you earned it. Easier to say you survived than to acknowledge the thousands of choices survival required. But luck didn’t finish my degrees. Luck didn’t stay up late writing papers after the kids went to sleep. It didn’t submit essays, revise drafts, sit through workshops, collect rejections, and try again. Luck didn’t build this life. I did. And that realization has been far more difficult to accept than any failure ever was. I didn’t graduate over and over again with stellar GPAs so my father could brag about me. I did it because I worked for it. Because I made those choices. It wasn’t easy. It was fucking brutal. But I am the one who did it.
I spent years believing survival was the only story worth telling. Creative nonfiction taught me that survival is only the beginning of the story. It’s about connections. It’s about realizing you are not alone, but that you stand among a community of people who have felt this way too, who have survived similar things and emerged on the other side.
It’s about saying the hard things. It’s about celebrating your victories unapologetically. It’s about understanding that your life is not merely something that happened to you. It is something worth examining. Something worth writing down. And, perhaps most importantly, something worth being proud of.
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