The next time someone brings up an essay I don’t know. A writer I’ve never heard of. In that tone, the one that says “OF COOOURSE you know the famous creator of all writing that is good and holy? Ya know, the master of written work whose seminal prose is what winds the clock of time and grants us all the space in which we exist to write.” You know, how people do. The next time I’m reminded how I haven’t read Didion. I didn’t catch Biss. I don’t know know who Susan Sontag is. The next time they do it I’m going to bring up finding foil, lighters, and white powder in the bathroom when I was 8. The next time they do it I’m going to talk about the times I threw my body in between my parents while they violently argued over who used the last of the drugs. The next time someone tells me about their influences I’m going to remind them I was kidnapped at 5 years old by my aunt and Grama because my mother was neglecting me. That’s what influenced alla dis.

It might hurt your gentle sensibilities to know that some of us didn’t go to high school and college, buckling under the pressure of being middle class and misunderstood by your parents. I don’t want sympathy, I want eyes. I want ears. I want you to see me as equal. To know that while I suffered harsh reality you grew up carefree chasing bugs and butterflies. We existed in the same world. Trauma and butterflies both live here.

Stories still found me and I devoured everything but don’t you know that writing happened before they existed and storytelling predates writing at all? I didn’t have to read the canon to know what’s compelling. That’s all well and good for you. I don’t envy it, though I know you think I do or I should want to. I don’t wish my life on anyone else. I don’t think I’m better for having suffered so much. I’d just as well like to have grown up any other way. But stories are the only way I know how to talk to other people. Otherwise, I am silent. I’m sure you’ve encountered me silently observing, listening, absorbing everything until the story fills in my head and I can name those thoughts with quite sophisticated ease.

It’s not my fault the way I suffered and what I missed and it’s not your fault you grew up however you have. What I can’t take is the prescriptive nature of the academy. The way regular people reinforce it so fucking always in the ways they draw the limits. The way they make invisible concessions to the gods of “good writing.” The way the world is obsessed with boundaries without questioning if abstract is just as meaningful. Just as important. Just as worthy of consideration.

When I finally read Didion  I could only get through half of A Year of Magical Thinking because I couldn’t connect. I’m so sorry your husband and daughter died how they did, and so close together. I know you have suffered. But you suffered in the best hospitals. Without worrying about—anything—but your grief. When my mother died I got a bill for nearly a million dollars and I had a panic attack. So no I didn’t get past page 100 because our grief is not the same. I didn’t learn anything about writing about grief from the rich white lady, I’m sorry. I’m sure she was a genius.




The only reason I am here is because I don’t want to be there. I refuse. It took so much work to crawl away from a world intent on killing me. All I had was words. All I had was escaping to the library to read Star Wars extended universe novels and books on the psychology of handwriting. When self-education couldn’t take me far enough I turned to traditional education only to be othered. Only to be disrespected  and made to feel stupid and wrong. For doing it out of order. Then for not knowing the steps. Yet once I’ve relaxed into a new institution. Once they have experienced the spark of my passion it’s over. It’s “Asha is so smart.” It’s “you shine.” It’s “you can go far.” Was I not shiny before you noticed? Was I not supposed to know I shined before you told me?

It’s because they need more me’s. It's because they need me more than I do, more than they know. It’s because the world needs these stories now. They always have. I am what’s missing. And I don’t fill space by being whatever is expected. Which is fine because I don’t know what they expect from me, anyway

​People keep asking me about grad school. How’s it going? What’s it like? And I can say I’m reading a lot. I’m meeting a lot of new writing. Meeting a lot of people, some of them I like. But I don’t know where or when I am.

Winter as a concept is new to me. Snow and cold is novel and exciting, though not necessarily in a good way. I keep opening the windows in my apartment after reading the temperature on an app. I want to feel it and know what nineteen degrees feels like, and eighteen, and four. Inside I crank the heater as high as 76 and run the ceiling fan to push the hot air into the office where I sit most of the day in front of the computer: typing, talking, singing along, watching my little box to see if I look like I’m paying attention. I lose myself momentarily in the virtual place: leaping through tabs of email, twitter, group chat with my sisters, and when I look outside at the blank white yard, silent ice, there’s a moment of dissonance: where was I just at? How am I here now? Where am I? In a chair in a house in a city in Iowa in the middle of the country on the back of the world suspended(?) or at least twirling on an axis through space creating time? Wasn’t it just morning? Why is it dark out?

Anyway, I think winter is fucking me up. Or the pandemic is fucking me up. Or grad school is fucking me up. Or wanting this is fucking me up. I was pretty solid about what I was looking for when I said yes. I didn’t know when I applied, and I didn’t know in the year I meant to apply but didn’t. But on the way I figured I would eat up the education, the connections, the legacy, the experience, and the stipend. I’d write an amazing manuscript and eventually I’d make my way to a deserving community college and I would share my knowledge and experience. I could keep writing and contribute to society in a way that I know, and that I know actually does change lives. And that would be an adequate life. More than adequate. That would be a good life. It could be great with the right accessories.

But now it’s not right. Now other ideas come to me. New fantasies because my world is opening in new ways. So many times I have to stop myself from lending it too much weight. I already made it in; I don’t need to continue to crawl through the snow on my knees. Besides the way people act too cool to be dazzled by the big name makes me hide my enthusiasm for being the first person in my family to ever be awarded a stipend and a teaching assistantship. It’s not their fault all their parents have degrees. But just once I’d like explicit permission to be happy and proud of something regardless of the hollowness of the institution. No one ever gives anything explicitly though and it’s not my fault I’m so shy.

I think it might be the pressure of letting people get to know me. I don’t feel like myself. I perform myself a lot more because I’m trying so hard not to crumble into so many old habits. I’m pushing myself to be the self I am when I’m by myself because I never let myself be her (as if that’s not a sentence to tell a therapist). I’m trying not to squander moments because they all feel so crucial.

You see, there’s just a lot to juggle and it’s hard enough to will my body out of this hand-me-down bed in my hand-me-down apartment towards my new possessions: My laptop, My electric kettle, My collection of oddly shaped jars that I promise to turn into something useful since Iowa doesn’t recycle glass. That’s my artist’s rendition of telling you I borrow and lean on others to move towards what’s new and good and meant for me. That’s how I’ve always gone through life, not because I’m humble and good hearted. I am also those things, but because I had to. I feel like I have to give this context whenever I do anything here. If I write something I gotta tell all the stories and the stories’ stories to make sure they know what I’m talking about. If I’m lost, I have to explain where I’m from and why I’m here, how lost am I exactly? I never feel like I simply exist, I explain.

The weight of the differentness I feel for being my age (somewhere between 36 and forever), for my race(s), for my background, for my body, for my teeth, for my hair, blah blah I suffer anxiety blah, falls on me. I feel my differences more than anyone else does. But sometimes I want you to know I’m different. I like that I’m different, though not in all those ways. I know that those things can be flipped over like a reversible figure and become the word “strengths,” instead of “weakness.” It’s just so tedious to not be “like everyone else.” I feel like I have visible training wheels and they can all see me struggling to catch up.

The other day I got so anxious to speak in a workshop I start to panic. I started to not make eye contact with my little box in case someone saw me. I tried to fix my face into blankly studious. I turned my camera off and ran to my bathroom to breathe hot and dab under my eyelashes and not scrape eyeliner down my cheek. I come back and practice a blank look. Camera on and I fidget. I pretend to look at my notes. I pretend to listen intently. I try to think of something that hasn’t already been said. I think they all know I haven’t spoken. I prime my lips to open and I feel the sharp knife of tears in my nose, so I turn off the camera again and pray to nothing that no one calls my name or asks me for anything. When the host has ended the meeting for all I want to throw it all away. The tears, especially, but the fear too, the mean subconscious voice calling me a dumb bitch for having the audacity to have the same thoughts towards the workshop piece that someone braver voiced before I did. I sob and feel sorry for myself. I try to remember to be grateful. I try to remember I asked for this, all of this.

It was one time. Let it go, let it pass. It happened a few times last semester and there was the time you cried for an hour after the Halloween party but that might’ve been because you started drinking at 2pm and mistakenly thought someone’s costume was just their regular look and were judging them for trying to look like David Foster Wallace (tell me you’re at a writer party without telling me you’re at a writer party) and you felt really bad about it. You’re sensitive and that’s a gift. No one does what you do, because they didn’t live the life you’ve lived. You’re the only one who can tell these stories in just this way. So, you were sad today, tomorrow is another chance to do this again, try all over.
​
They ask me how is grad school? What’s your MFA like? How’s Iow— Ohi— Idahuh--
it’s Iowa, right? And I usually smile my prettiest one and look down humbly, as if to say I don’t deserve all this when I know that I unequivocally, absolutely, and undoubtedly deserve every good thing that happens to me, including intentionally isolating myself from my family to teach rhetoric and talk about “my process” with a bunch of other nerds who miss the library like I do. I know that my life is changing, and I can feel myself floating just an inch off the ground unmoored from gravity as I adjust to the uprooted habits and the lost artifacts of the person I survived to become this one. I don’t know where I am, don’t know where I’m going, but I’m experiencing it all and spinning it into something resembling gold.
 

I've been slowly (extremely slowly) working on an essay about working at SeaWorld San Diego for a third of my life. It's actually been much harder than i assumed to reopen the wounds. You would think it's just a job, why would it hurt? That's kind of what I'm writing about. Hopefully I will do the things I want to do in this essay and who knows maybe I will try to publish it somewhere. Or publish it myself.
I will say, with all the shitty labor practices and trauma that i've been apart of and witness to, I find it impossible no one else has ever written about what a terrible employer SeaWorld is. I feel like I'm digging into unknown territory, which is both exciting and scary. Everything written about SeaWorld is only from the past 6 years and the controversy surrounding Blackfish and Orca captivity. Which is obviously a high profile issue. My problem with it is that the abusive labor practices (of most corporate jobs/theme parks) are not even a blip, although both have probably been relevant since the park's inception. I get it, no one really cares about the working conditions in low-wage job. To other Americans those people deserve what they get.  Pull your damn self up by your own damn bootstraps, low-wage unskilled laborers. So maybe my piece will illuminate some of these things.
This is something I've wanted to write for years. I left SW finally in 2014, after 11 years. I had no back-up. I thought I'd become a full time student, which never really happened, but I'm the closest I've ever been. I had no savings. I had no job lined up. I was desperate to get away from the toxic, eternally teenaged mindset, and the utter lack of options. I finally feel ready to tackle some of the stuff I dealt with that informed so much of my life and decisions. I also finally have an angle or a hook to examine it from, which I won't go into detail here.
I'm basically procrastinating the writing of this essay by writing this blog post, but I do want to share an early version of this. A short lyrical piece about feeling stuck in a job, a theme park, and artificial happiness.

A few years ago, I took a class at Humboldt State called Queer Women's Memoir. I was taking it at the same time I was taking a creative nonfiction class. This proved to be the magic formula for me to write about some uniquely me, but completely not unique, experiences with same-sex attraction. I struggled and still do with that fact that I get soft and wet for men as well as women. Sometimes it's the other way, women make me soft and men make me gag. In fact, when I was a younger woman, I spent a lot of time in Hillcrest, a gay-borhood of San Diego, completely oblivious to the fact that part of why I loved it there was not because I was safe from bro-dudes rejecting my fat body, but because I was a gay. I just didn't know that. I was still insisting that my intense feelings towards my female friend was some kind of fluke. I didn't like Women, I loved Her. I wasn't a lesbian, because I still had feelings for dudes. Plus I didn't drive a Subaru, or wear cargo shorts, or whatever other dumb lesbian stereotype I believed. I just liked this one woman this one time before defaulting to paranormal heteronormativity. All my experience with men in a romantic sense was awful and traumatic, but I couldn't imagine being in a relationship with a woman. I could only seem to see man, wife, coupla kids, and a dog. Even when that didn't seem to be what I wanted. I was supposed to want that, wasn't I? Denial is a strange town.
Took years and another failed attempt at falling madly for a woman to realize my romantic feelings didn't have to be as cut and dry as society made it seem. It took A Cup of Water Under My Bed, Daisy Hernandez and, especially,  Spit and Passion, Cristy C. Road and some help from my self-proclaimed lesbian uncle Heal McKnight, who taught my creative nonfiction class, to see that there are a lot of ways to be a little gay and that that queerness wasn't barred by rules about who, how, or what to love. Spit and Passion married fandom and queerness in a way that respooled my brain. I didn't know other Green Day fans felt as complicated as I did. I didn't realize what Billie Joe was singing half the time or why I loved Dookie so much, but suddenly 20 years later Road opened my ears so now all I hear are the gay parts. She also reintroduced me to the closet. She helped to define my closet retroactively and because of that I wrote this flash piece. 
Yes, Girls Too allowed me to clarify the closet I (still) lived in and to free the lingering questions I kept about myself. There is a lot left out of this. And I think about expanding it when I re-read it. Someday, maybe. 
In honor of National Coming Out Day it felt appropriate to share. Yes, Girls Too: a short story about closets. 

As I haven't updated this website in a good year it got a little bit stale.  There is no one to apologize to, unless you're my single fan from Indonesia who downloaded "Yes, Girls Too." We should talk sometime, ya know, if you speak English or know someone who can translate. I always intended to write something weekly, but life gets away from you. I also found other places to post my thoughts in quicker formats, namely Instagram where I like to create little art pieces for my semi-okay poems. Unlike essay or narrative writing, I don't "care" about my poems. I care, but I rarely craft or revise my poems. They're either publishable because they dig at emotions within, or they stay locked forever in a folder I have labeled "drafts." Fully formed or not at all.
I first came to call my poems 'first draft' when I realized I often posted poems that I wrote in a burst and didn't do much else to. It's vulnerable to post poems that haven't had the chance to ripen, but I'm barely a poet. I'm not a serious one. I'm clearly my worst critic but I fully embrace that my poetry is derivative of others, messy, non-formal, but also not experimental. They're mostly nonsense, and almost all about the same girl, but I love them and they mark emotions somehow like waterlines. Sometimes I'm feeling low tide and I want to reveal my wonders, or my sappy heartbreak and fiery wit.
I wrote fanfiction for a (long) while and the genre swells with messy half thought fantasy and schmaltz. I got used to the constant feedback and joy of sharing things you love with others. I will forever want to share pieces as they're piecing together, first drafts.
Added to this is I recently moved across the country and finally scanned a lot of my old notebooks into my very own archive of terrible writing. Only not all is terrible. All together there are moments of brilliance that if I had more confidence might be full blown publishable writing, but as of now are just fragments of an emerging writer, someone trying things over and over.
I want to share some of these almost as if to reveal to the world this famous forgotten person, a younger!Asha whom I don't think I am anymore. Younger!Asha is a good writer but she has no idea what she's doing and she doesn't have a name for it. Older!Asha has the language (some of it) but she still hasn't read a sentence of Joan Didion, so I'm not sure I can call myself any kind of authority on creative nonfiction, but I'm learning. Mostly I'm learning that I was learning how to write memoir and essays and personal narrative before I even knew that was thing. All the memoirs I read as a kid (ie, any time before 30) I labeled biography or autobiography. I have felt insecure about my limited knowledge of Creative Nonfiction with capital letters. Insecure every time a classmate in my MFA names some person who is a blank grey blob in my mind (who is that? what is that? who? WHo?) or some essay they've all read. But...why?
If I can write what I write without having read Didion doesn't that make me...amazing? or something? I'm self-taught. Auto-didact, is the college word for it. Maybe this is what my professor calls my "superpowers." I will take it. At least I will tonight, though I know tomorrow will bring me a new way to feel insecure about it and I will TRY to make up for it. 
So, this will be a blog of sorts, a place to ramble and write and try things. A home or hub for my first drafts. It feels naughty to share unfinished and unpolished work but some of these pieces would never be more than they are and why shouldn't I share them? Who benefits from the labor I put into producing these tiny gems if they remain digital files on my computer? Maybe they'll show some other younger!Asha out there that we're the same, that no one spits out gold, that first drafts are as important as crafted pieces, that process is a part of craft. 
Ultimately, I need no reason but my will to share. I wear my heart on my sleeve and I'm an honest person. In that spirit I present First Drafts, a blog for messy writing, forgotten writing, and a place for me to share the insecurity of being. Being a writer, being a poet, being alive, take your pick.

I've been trying to read more this summer, now that i don't have school to occupy all my time I can do things I actually like to do.  What a concept! I finished "Men We Reaped" from Jesmyn Ward. It was powerful. I cried so much and even though our experiences are not the same there was a glimmer of connection, the raw way she writes about her life, reflective, but blunt and not candied. It was inspiring. It gets me thinking about all the things I want to write. The things I need to write.
I've also been working on my image, my brand if you will. I finally separated my personal insta from a strictly writing one. I feel like my website needs a little work, just a little more geared towards who I am and what I'm trying to accomplish.  It's just a big task. But I'm sure I'll find my footing. 
Go follow @asha.galindo on insta to see some more of my writing and poetry. Eventually I'd like to read some work in my stories.  Not necessarily spoken word or even poetry. I like the idea of reading my personal essays aloud. We shall see. 

I should qualify that. I am co-writing a book on the history of Toyon, the lit(erary) magazine from Humboldt State. I spent some time this week in between finishing finals and prepping for houseguests, meeting with important people, learning about my workspace, outlined how the process is going to look, and earmarked time to work with my co-author, Erika Andrews. I know I have the skills and talent to do this project, and it's the kind of thing I've dreamt of doing my whole life. It's kinda humbling to think that what seemed like a thousand worlds away from the places I grew up is not as far from who I am now. I thought of the process of writing and making a book as something that would make me feel accomplished, like a success.
I feel like I'm on the inside looking out now, looking at the me peering through the glass, trying to glimpse how the sausage gets made. I'm baffled as to why she doesn't just try the door. The door was never looked, I was just afraid that it was. I assumed it was. Somehow, somewhere, I internalised that sense that I didn't belong.
A girl I once loved asked me "who told you your writing was bad?" and I shrugged and said, "I don't know, nobody." "Then why do you think that?" So much of our relationship has washed under the surf and forgotten, but I remember when she said that. I've never forgotten that. It's a simple thing that reminds me how much I've stood in my own way. It reminds me that no one will tell you no until you ask.

I don't know that I want to write a "my first blog post." But I suppose it's already happening, so here we go.
I am days away from finishing my bachelor's degree at Humboldt State in English. Honestly, it's a little surreal, and I don't mind if that's cliche here. It has taken me so very long to get to this place.  For so long I felt so unworthy of things. Never that I couldn't do it, I always knew I could. But feeling like I deserve success? That's a different ball game. 
Now I'm here though, so many years struggling to pay rent and eat. So many frustrated tears and anxiety attacks. A few hiccups, but I finished. I'm done! 
The future is already here.
How soon IS now, anyway?