Sometimes One is All You Need

When I was in college I fancied myself as being too punk rock to do things like study, but I did manage to make an effort in my creative writing class. I wrote a perfectly dreadful story—based on a British punk rock movie starring Adam Ant—about a futuristic society (in 1998!) where people go around beating each other to death for fun. The professor had no choice but to give me an A on it because, as loathsome as it was, he couldn’t find that it was badly written, just, as he dryly noted in the margin, overly determined to be shocking.

The class discussion was uncomfortable, to say the least. My classmates were appalled. One girl started crying while she told us she couldn’t read the whole thing because it made her sick to her stomach. Another girl wrote a poem as a sort of rebuttal, about city people who think they’re so cool but they’re really dead inside. (She was incensed by “kids who are all about orange hair and purple shoes.” Snap! I am a redhead and I had a pair of purple Mary Jane high heels.) In short, they all hated it and, I was pretty sure, they hated me for subjecting them to it.

I thought they were a bunch of babies. But still. That writer part of me was in there, buried deeply under the mountain of desperate insecurity that was buried under the façade of rebellion and indifference. And that tiny little writer was stung to have my story so roundly despised. I sat in the classroom feeling like I was being pelted with rotten tomatoes and poked with pitchforks and I tried not to care.

But there was one person in the class whose opinion I couldn’t pretend didn’t matter. The woman who sat behind me was a recently widowed housewife who was going back to school. She had always been genuinely nice to me, despite my orange hair and purple shoes. The others could bite me, but I suddenly felt like a big asshole for writing something that might hurt her feelings since she had just gone through the death of her husband. My thin façade was crumbling—I sucked and I knew it and now the whole class knew it, even the one person I liked.

Except she didn’t see it that way. Her soft voice began to drown everyone out.

“I disagree with everyone,” she said. “I really liked this story. It was supposed to be disturbing. It was supposed to make you angry.” She thought I’d really captured something important about casual violence in our society and what the future could hold. She was almost indignant that the others in the class didn’t see how good it was.

I’m pretty sure I started crying, at least a little.

After class I thanked her profusely for sticking up for me and over the years I’ve never forgotten. As a depressed, self-involved teenager it was certainly a pleasant surprise, having a grown-up not treat me like a pest or a disease. But as a writer I’ve grown to understand what a gift I got that day in class—an audience, a reader who truly appreciated my work. I didn’t necessarily deserve it, but I definitely needed it.