I realized that I might not be as healthy as I think I am. On Thursday night, I had a breakdown when E refused to put the games in my room as he had promised. I just started crying so hard and thinking that I didn’t have to do this to myself, trying to be a writer and taking care of kids and working; it’s all just too much for me to handle.

Then I thought about mom and how she must have struggled through all the resistance from people around her. Ambition and the desire to protect her family were what helped her to success at business, and I feel I could be ambitious too when I try to be a better writer. But I realized that ambition is not what makes me happy; it’s being who I am that makes me happy. I don’t want to do it anymore if being a good writer means I have to become someone who I am not.

I enjoy writing when I write for myself because writing is like a process of problem-solving to me. Therefore it often doesn’t make sense to other people when my writings read like how I had solved my problem in my head, without a context: this is the self-understanding I gained after taking the creative nonfiction class. I have also learned that the writing skills and the techniques should only serve as tools to help me find my clarity, instead of to nourish my desire for recognition. What’s the most precious about writing is finding one’s thoughts and I hope everything I have learned in class will help me to find and polish my thoughts.