Summer 2018, “The Best Two Weeks of My Life”
by: Celine Choi
When I had cancer, I was a girl who was defined by her bravery first—bald and timid but sustained by the outpouring of love from healthcare professionals, her best friend, and above all, her parents. I did not hide my illness nor did I let it define me. But when I turned 16, I became a patient of another illness. This time, I fear that it is endemic, and does define me. The illness is depression, and it is a cruel master that asks me to prove my worth again and again, relentlessly.
Academically, I was no stranger to starving, bleeding, and crying to achieve awards and grades. I was destroying myself physically in the name of this condition. More than anything, I feared the space I took up because I felt undeserving, unwanted, and persecuted in my environment. My academic ambitions were not motivated by a future goal such as college applications, but rather by the unrelenting thirst I had to be validated in the present. My academic ambitions were also not motivated by passion, because the rigorous confines I had set for myself left little room for any introspection. Moreover, I had long lost my connection to writing. Picking it up again felt impossible—I could only bear to invest my energies into things I felt I could be the best at. If I were to write again, it would be nothing more than another medium to gauge my worthiness as a human.
Yet, on a whim, I applied to a summer poetry workshop my sophomore year. On the first day of camp, the director told us that during the decade he served as program director, he had received emails years after students graduated, telling him that this was the best two weeks of their life. Surrounded by a hundred strangers in Gambier, Ohio, I felt baffled. Learning that many of these strangers were already published authors or had years of poetry writing under their belt compared to my perpetual writers’ block, I found it even harder to believe any transformation could await me here. I was already far out of my depth.
But on the final night of the summer writing workshop, the weather was syrupy, as if it was thick with the hopes, sentences, and memories that had accrued in this newfound home of ours. We were faintly cognizant of the potentially permanent goodbyes the next day would be filled with. We piled onto the red leather couches of the dorm commons and spoke to each other for hours with all of the sincerity of people who may never see one another again.
I didn’t believe that a time as short as two weeks could affect any meaningful change in me. I stumbled into the workshop with doe-eyed innocence, hesitation, and insecurity. While I came out with those lingering qualities, more significantly, I left with an ability to call myself something I believed I was too inexperienced, too young, and too sheltered to call myself, but that I had secretly wanted to become for my entire life: a Writer. Moreover, I found a community of teenage writers, and people I still call my closest, dearest friends within this camp. On the flight home, I felt pathetic as I cried reading the anthology we had created at camp, but I felt change brewing even as I closed my eyes and willed myself to accept this uncomfortable sensation of completion, of feeling like enough.