When I was a kid, I loved reading. My favorite activity was to curl up on the couch and get lost in a good piece of fiction. My mom would have to literally take my books away so that I would be forced to socialize.  Naturally, this obsession made me believe that my dream job was to be an author. I wanted to be able to write stories that made people feel things. But that was a goal for a grown-up.

As a perpetually insecure child, I never started a journal or a diary, never wrote outside of coursework, and never actually took any of the steps that would have made me a writer. I didn’t think anything I had to say was important or worth immortalizing. But still I kept my dream of being a writer tucked in my pocket, so no one could see it but I could feel safe knowing it was there. I always promised I would start writing when I got smart enough, talented enough, inspired enough.

That dream has mutated throughout my own personal journey. Ten-year-old me was convinced she was going to write a novel when she grew up; fifteen-year-old me knew that journalism was where she needed to be; nineteen-year-old me has accepted that she wants writing to be important to her career and refuses to stress about the specifics.

This is an evolution that is mirrored in the changes in my reading habits; where I once devoured fantasy novels as a form of escapism, middle school found me reading books like An Autobiography of Malcolm X and Lies my Teacher Told Me, both of which were recommended by a teacher. I moved from recognizing social issues on their most basic level in fictional worlds, issues that were easy for me to push away as radically different than the world I lived in (even thought they really weren’t), to books that were centered on real world social movements and events. I became captivated by these stories.

Middle school was also when I started reading the news. Suddenly I was inundated with reports of injustices around the world, but, curiously, few that elaborated on the injustices in the United States.  I also became more aware of my own identity as a young Muslim woman. It’s not that I woke up one day shocked that I was brown and Muslim – it was that I realized that the experiences I had were not common among all people. Not everyone had normalized the idea that the government may be listening to their private conversations. Not everyone stayed away from calling things “the bomb”. Not everyone got a stern talking to about cooperation before marching into the airport 3 hours early to account for “random” selection.

Honestly, that was a bit of a revelation for me. It became clear that the faint suspicions I had felt towards my novels and towards the news was because I wasn’t seeing my story being told. And then I started thinking about what other stories weren’t being told. What information was I missing because I didn’t know that I had to even look for it? And then I started wondering why those stories might not be told. And then I thought about why it was those stories – often full of corruption and negligence and –isms. And then I started wondering what I could do to fix that. And then I decided to pursue a career in policy and stopped actively dreaming about being a writer until I learned about the minor.

Of course, I believed in the power of writing at its most basic level: it was a way to communicate information – a skill both admired and required for an influential career. But my work during the course of this gateway class has illuminated some other reasons I want to write – reasons that have always been implied, but never made explicit.

Writing facilitates power exchanges. As someone who has often felt powerless to influence her own narrative, writing can be a way to take back that agency. So many moments of social change have started because of influential pieces of writing. It’s being able to revel in the personal and being able to connect to the larger world around us. Much of my interest in policy stems from the fact that decisions that affect my communities were made with little regard to what was needed. We had little control. Writing is a way to reclaim that agency. Writing, it seems, is a way to be heard when you are being silenced. This theme clearly permeates through my writing on this portfolio – it’s how I choose which stories to tell.

More than which stories I tell, it also influences the way I try to tell them.

This writing portfolio is a clear indicator of that fact. I chose to repurpose a fifteen page research paper about HOPE VI, having thought that the subject matter was both interesting and important, but also that the required approach was too clinical. The academic research report was not structured to value the voices of anyone other than politicians, planners, and other researchers. The paper also lacked a place to clearly pass judgment – so much of what I read in my original research just spoke to appalling negligence and mistreatment, but my disgust had to be condensed into one objective sentence. When given a chance to go back and re-do something, it was this piece that seemed it could best benefit from a makeover.

This was meant to showcase the “human” side of the story my academic report was telling. But this was a goal that quickly changed as I attempted to write the piece. My first realization was that the “human” side of this story was not actually a clear, defined point-of-view. Was I just trying to inject some emotion into this story? Yes, I wanted to tell the stories of those most marginalized within the narrative of the Desire Projects, but who was I to tell that story?

It would come as no surprise to anyone that racism was a major force in the story of a public housing project in New Orleans. I wasn’t contributing anything new to that field – the sheer number of books and news articles examining the same topic clearly indicates that the topic is pretty thoroughly charted ground.

My original idea to create an intensely emotional piece tracking displaced Desire residents was quickly thrown out because I was not a displaced Desire resident, had no personal connection to the area, had never even traveled to New Orleans. I had no credibility. And so I had to ask myself why I was interested in this story, beyond that it was required for a course. What was it that fascinated me? And after some research, some soul-searching, and some hastily scribbled bullet points in a desperate attempt to create a draft by the deadline, I realized this: the Desire story stood out to me not only because of the specifics, but for the way that it seemed as only a heightened version of events that played out all across the country.

But still, I struggled to write a full draft.  One of the main reasons for this is just a personal failing – I research too much. Before I speak on anything, I want to read and talk and understand. There is a fear to say something with confidence only to find that it is wrong, or to realize that I’ve overlooked an important aspect of the history. Suddenly, I was overthinking every sentence and collecting enough research to compile a book. And I still wasn’t getting anywhere. It seemed that I couldn’t write ia all.

When I reflect upon this semester and the complete and total writers’ block I was experiencing, I think a lot of it stems from fear. Fear that I wasn’t saying anything useful. Fear that I was saying something untrue. Fear that I would write this piece and come back two years later and find it to be severely lacking. But this experience has also convinced me of another fact: writing is really only a quarter the physical act of writing something down. Before a sentence can form on the page, there is a whole process that has to occur. In this way, writing (and thinking deeply about what I want to be writing), forces me to understand my own thoughts better. It makes me have to challenge myself and expand upon my opinions. If I can’t write it down and find meaning in it, then I have to reexamine the meaning it takes on within my own thoughts.

This particular piece of writing, the portfolio in its entirety, involved a lot of thinking. Too much thinking, if I’m being honest. But ultimately, it allowed me to find the themes that really interested me. The patterns of government negligence and the incompatible needs of residents and city administration; what is meant for cities to choose whose needs to accommodate; and how each larger decision made is a culmination of smaller decisions, some made with the best of intent and others made by corrupt means.

The remediation game was meant to then exemplify one part of that series of claims as well as impart some personal responsibility on the audience. I wanted to show that even if you were trying your best to be fair (which many of the people involved in the bureaucratic mistakes that plagued Desire did not have), that there would always be something in your way. There was no real way to win because often, policy was contradictory and events outside of your control would set you back by decades. It was hard not to let the game turn in to an hour long adventure because the decision making is so complicated, but I realized that it worked better with limited choice. How much power does one person have, especially in the face of city budgets and weather disasters? What sacrifices do we think we have to make? And, in the end, does our intention mean anything if the outcome is the same?

I never wanted to provide answers. Even if I had the inclination, I wouldn’t have answers to give. I thought I wanted to discuss solutions, but I really only wanted to ask a new set of questions. As I thought through what I wanted this portfolio to be, I realized that I couldn’t really claim anything with complete honesty. I wanted for there to be an easy solution. I wanted to be able to say: “If they had just listened to the residents, it would have been okay”. But the story is always more complicated than that, and writing this portfolio gave me to work with that across mediums.

When I started this project, I knew I wanted to write about discrimination and institutional racism. And when I think of why I write, a large reason is because I think it’s important to understand and expose those systems. But writing itself does not guarantee social change nor does it mean that something will be read. Systems of oppression and censorship are still at play, even as you may try to write them away. So then, why write? When the chance for creating a lasting change is slim?  When the potential for anyone to see what you’ve written is almost nonexistent?

To me, writing something can make it more real. It’s being a little selfish and believing that maybe, just maybe, someone will find it and read it and know that you existed and that you thought something tangible. When you die, you take your ideas with you unless you turn them into something, even a piece of writing on flimsy paper. When considering dominant narratives, I think of what it might mean to have dissenting opinions absent from those stories. What does it mean if no one communicates their dissatisfaction with the status quo because they don’t believe anything may change? How does it change history if there is no proof of resistance?

So maybe my writing won’t mean anything. Maybe no one will ever read it. Maybe someone in the future will dig it up out of its digital grave and it will become important in some way. I don’t really know, but it feels like giving up to not even try.