Self portrait in a text mirror

The first time I read my work aloud before an audience other than my mirror was two months ago, at a poetry reading at Columbia. Until then, I had hidden behind my writing in ways that made me less vulnerable. Instead of a flimsy sheet of paper, I used locked diaries with death threats on them and typed messages on impersonal screens. More than anything else, I had my online journal.

I called it an online journal for the same reason academics call long comic books “graphic novels.” “Blog” sounded ugly and “Xanga” sounded juvenile and embarrassing—both suggested I filled each entry with trivial accounts of my teen angst. In middle and high school, it was not the events in my life that I needed to publish, but my personality: as far as my peers were concerned, I did not have one.

When I started college this year, it was my fifth time as the new kid in school, and I still did not know how to talk to people. Three middle schools into seventh grade, I did not talk at all: I was so averse to public speaking that I would leave for the bathroom whenever a teacher called attendance. And though I should have been used to them, even an expert on them, icebreakers were about as fun for me as pop quizzes. To this day I have a strange stutter and people who aren’t afraid of deepening my discomfort say it reminds them of Porky Pig’s.

I started my online journal to make up for all the silences and missed connections, to say everything I did not say in school. The entries were long—some up to five pages, single-spaced on a Microsoft Word document, and I wrote a new one every day instead of doing my homework or sitting down to dinner. I would not have put so much time and effort into them if I did not have a growing audience. But every day more people from my homeroom and math class wrote comments on the site and stopped me in the hallway, more people began to listen to the voice of the mute and timid new kid. I became a social commentator on middle school, and later, on high school life, and more importantly, I was now allowed to be socially inept in the name of writing. When I lost class elections in 10th grade, I walked quickly down the hall to avoid sympathetic stares. The air blew in my eyes until they watered, and despite my protests, everyone thought I was crying. This, one of my most painful social experiences, became the greatest comedic fodder for an entry.

Though I thought I spoke the truth, though I thought my peers finally knew who I was, they only knew a persona. I edited myself.

One day, I met a writer for preteen books at a book signing. I am ashamed to say I didn’t even pretend I had read her novel when I cut through the line of middle school students, pen and paper in my hand, as if I wanted to give her my autograph. Instead I gave her the Web address to my online journal and I told her I wanted to be a writer. Two months later, she e-mailed me back, asking if I would be interested in compiling the entries into a book that would be published as fiction.

After that, I had no problem talking to people in school—now all I did was talk about my book deal. But when I faced a blank word document, its whiteness was somehow less welcoming than it once was. I wanted to contain my life in a book so badly that I could not. In my private diary, I asked, “how can I write a book on something that is going on as I write the book?” A year after making the deal, I e-mailed the author that I needed a break. I am still on it. I have not written in my online journal since. Until the poetry reading at Columbia two months ago, I was the mute new kid again, hiding my thoughts behind computer screens and within closed notebooks.

Though I had bothered to print out the verse and match my socks, I did not think I would actually get up to read the poem until the kid next to me on the sofa pushed me off it and said, “You’re up.”

My voice and my hands were like rabbits. I stuttered the poem as quickly as possible and when it was finally over, I heard fingers snap like rain. A girl in the audience complimented the speed in which I read my piece. “Like you were at a confession,” she said. “Yes,” I said, folding and unfolding the page, “all part of the performance.”

The author is a Barnard College first-year. She is an associate editorial page editor.