In middle school I did a book report on Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers.

I remember only a few things about the book because that was a while ago now. I remember that people were batteries, that it had an unhappy ending, and that there was a female character who preferred dildos to men.

I believe she was meant to be an unlikeable character but that didn’t hit with me, that seems like a Stephen King problem. I read the line about her preferring her vibrator and nodded and said ‘girlboss’.

What’s important about this is that my English teacher pulled me aside to tell me that I needed to diversify my reading. This is a nice way of putting it. That’s generously assuming what he meant. What he told me was to stop reading horror and go read something ‘nice’.

He didn’t think horror or sci-fi were worth discussing academically.

What kind of teacher tells a child punching way above the rest of the class’s weight to stop reading? Well. A lot of them did. I went from not being able to read to reading 600 page books in short order and I assure you: no one gave a shit.

I feel like many people promote these gushy stories about really inspiring teachers and influential figures in their childhood that helped to push them through —-it just has never been my experience.

This is an extremely mild example of that.

I think those gushy stories have appeal because in reality there’s so few of them.

I didn’t like school. I didn’t apply myself. I didn’t see a point. I was always being discouraged for being too different, or weirdly for being too introverted. Nothing kills connection with someone like demanding it. So I stopped trying. School was just something I did for a portion of the day.

What I did, what I thought taught me anything worthwhile, was reading and looking things up for myself.

I envy, in a way, those people who had a mentor or just a helping adult, but I appreciate that I never learned to rely on that, too.

I probably have more horror stories than most when it comes to bad experiences as a child with adults. I didn’t have a good experience with teachers, really, beyond the superficial, until they were called professors.

Maybe it was that I was old enough or mature enough to put aside my absolute distrust. But I had a professor who convinced me to double major, who convinced me to take more literature classes, who came up behind me while I sat in the student center with a cup of coffee, looked over my shoulder, and said “Red heads, huh?”

I’m still embarrassed about that but won’t elaborate because it’s funnier this way.

Because I took that second major, I had a thesis advisor who used to yell at me —you always need a theoretical framework! You can’t just present evidence for itself! Don’t let anyone draw their own conclusions! Treat your reader like you’re the goddamn expert!

It flew in the face of my counseling training.

She made me read dozens of philosophers trying to figure out where I fit into things. I fought her every step of the way, and she fought with me, and I called her ‘The German’. She asked me why I bothered double majoring, she was always on my ass that I should work in the arts and stop with the psych major. She resented psychology as a field and I was treating her field like a hobby. She said I needed to get serious.

Then when I had finished and I stood in front of that room of professors and students and took questions, and did that whole bit, I told her, “I think I finally get Foucault,” and she hugged me.

I think there’s a deeper lesson in what she was getting at than just telling me to root myself in a school. You need your people, you need to define your opinions. A lot of writers don’t know what they’re talking about until they’re done talking. Opinions solidify in the editing process. There’s a great James Baldwin quote about it, one of my favorite quotations about writing at all,

“When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”

It’s why people are drawn to writing. It’s about communicating. The whole process of writing a novel is finding a topic, screaming about it, and then looking around and saying, “You too?”

I’d never really had any opportunity to figure out who else agreed with me, or who else had had my opinions before, because I never had any adult sit with me before and say ‘you don’t know shit’ in a patient way instead of a condescending one. So much of how we talk to children comes from a culture of shame while knowing that harshness accomplishes nothing. There is nothing in life that benefits from being harsh about it.

And that confuses people, people who can’t delineate between aggressive and assertive. That professor never went easy on me, and she called me an idiot more than once, but being gentle and being patient does not mean being easy. And too often people see someone ‘going easy’ on someone else and they feel that they have to step in, to bring the harshness, because that’s all they know. They don’t acknowledge that it just doesn’t work.

Every person I’ve ever talked to who’s been depressed is harsh on themselves and every other person that they come across, even if it’s in the quietest voice. Being kind isn’t about how you say it, it’s about what you’re really saying. People want things wrapped up in these too cushy, too gentle, constant streams of validation or they want punishment and to punish—because they aren’t thinking of the reality of a situation, they’re thinking of shame.

The world is a much better place when you’re actually aware of it.