Sara Ezzat – September 2020

I began with poetry. When I was little I loved the Flower Fairies books; I memorized the poems and then began to write my own. I remember writing a poem about the Olympian Ben Johnson and the doping scandal all the adults were talking about. I doubt it was good, but I was eight and had not yet found my inner critic.

My teenage self did not write about disgraced sportsmen. Angst-ridden goth that I was, listening to The Cure I filled notebooks with poems about death, mortality, and the unbearable burden of adolescence. I still have several of those notebooks, filled with poems surrounded by doodles of anks and bats. My inner critic was alive now and aware that it was all terribly cliché. That is when I stopped writing poetry.

As I began university I found I had a talent for essay writing. What I did not have a talent for was organization. Nor had I learned that if you chase perfection all you get is missed deadlines, irritated professors, and failing grades. Bluntly put, I flunked.

It took me fourteen years to return to higher learning. In the interim, I wrote personal narratives; short pieces about my life or my thoughts. However, my inner critic was strong, and I never sought to share beyond my friends.  While I did not share my writing, I did try to improve it with writing classes. In a business writing class, I met a man more passionate about grammar than I could have imagined. He taught me a lot, even if I still overuse commas. I learned more about the craft of writing, but I struggled with my inner critic.

I did not know that every writer struggles with the critic. I had heard many say it, but I did not truly believe it. Then I got to know Ian, who makes deep, beautiful video essays about philosophy and Buffy that reach quite a large audience. And yet he doubts himself as a writer, openly and constantly. As we became friends, he encouraged me, listened to my opinions and I started putting them into writing. Into what would become my own channel. One of the central metaphors Ian returns to is Sisyphus, always going to get the rock again no matter how often it falls. And so, learning to confront my critic, I went to get my post-secondary rock again. 

I intended to take a one-year course in communication, looking to get a better job. And yet suddenly my journalism teacher was reading my writing to the class. It was he who encouraged me to ignore the critic and give university another try. It took me most of my first year to know what I wanted to major in. I chose Gender Studies and Film Studies. I knew I was on the right track when I spent part of my summer researching the Male Gaze for a video essay. That video did very well, and it seems after my years of fighting my critic I have learned to write critique. And this summer, more than twenty years after I stopped, I began to write poetry again.