The Knowers Turns One

Today's Snapchat memory

A year ago today, I published The Knowers. Simultaneously, it feels like it's been much longer since I sent it into the world, but also as if it were yesterday.

In honor of The Knowers's first birthday, here is why I decided to publish it. (Yes, it was my college essay!)

My blood runs cold when a teacher asks for something in pen. Nothing I write ever seems solidified enough to condemn to permanence, as I’m not one for that level of commitment. There’s no going back with pen--every line you make is forever yours.

A simple fix to this commitment issue: I always use pencil when left to my own devices. Add two numbers incorrectly? Erase it. Write down the wrong date? Erase it. Pencil is one of the few things in life for which you have a reset button. You can do away with any evidence that you can’t do math or don’t know how to use a calendar.

So why does everyone always want everything in pen? Is it out of desire for us to be able to see each mistake we’ve made? To force us to recognize the immutability of our words and therefore deprive us of the chance to go back on them? Is it all a microcosm for humanity’s inability to backtrack and reverse some of our greatest aberrations?

The answer, of course, is that I have no idea.

To solve this problem, one’s left to no other option but confidence in what they write. Until this past May, this was an issue for me. Then, like most things, I erased it.

Over four years, I wrote a novel. The Knowers is my soul on paper, basically. My fictional world always served as a refuge from my reality; anything could happen within my Word doc. Nothing endured there. I always had an undo function and a delete key.

However, I’d always had fantasies of people falling in love with my characters and longing to be a part of the pages I’d written, but in actually, only three people had read it and one of them was me. If I wanted to get it out to more people, I had to publish it.

The only thing holding me back was this looming threat of irreversibility. Once the grammar was checked and the files all sent, there was no going back. The story loses its pliability. I lose my virtual clay. It’s sent to the kiln and each word morphs from something evanescent into an ineradicable part of the universe.  

But I wanted to. I needed to. Everything I’d ever thought or believed or loved was somewhere in that book. Nothing I had ever produced was as intimate or intricate. It was me. I wanted me out there, even if I had to be in ink.

For the first time in my life, I was proud enough of something to bestow immortality upon it. I told my story; I felt I told it well. Why dwell on what I could have said instead of venerate what I did say? Why long for transience when reversion is what’s truly detrimental?

With some help from my parents and tons of encouragement from everyone else in my life, I sent The Knowers into the atmosphere through Amazon CreateSpace. Within a month, I had sold forty copies. I signed books between classes at school; I answered questions about writing in homeroom. To my surprise, people actually liked it.

I subsequently set down my pencil and opted for pen. My words became solidified extensions of me rather than wisps of perfunctory thoughts. I am committed to myself and what I write because what I say matters and deserves to be indestructible.

There is no point in writing something you’ll only take back--I learned this as the cloddish eraser fell from my hands and my words bled into the paper. My words are ink. I am ink.

We are as lasting as we allow ourselves to be.

Happy first birthday, The Knowers.