Insecure Writer’s Support Group Blog Post for January 2025

Happy New Year. No one knows what 2025 is going to bring, but I’m opting to believe it will be no worse than 2024. The world is a mess on all levels, and I can’t bring myself to believe it’ll get worse. So, I’m choosing to be an optimist about it and looking forward to brighter days.

January 8 question – Describe someone you admired when you were a child. Did your opinion of that person change when you grew up?

It took me a long time to come up with an answer for this question because the truth is that I can’t think of a single person I admired as a child–not even sure I would’ve understood what the word meant. I loved my parents and grandparents and sought to please them, something I did as long as I had them in my life.

As a teenager, I admired my teachers, specifically Miss Columbus, my English teacher. She’d lost her love during the war and never married. She still wore her hair the way she had in the early forties and her clothes were all from that era. She was hunched over, with one hip higher than the other, but never acted as if she were in pain which, thanks to my own body, I know that she must’ve been.

It was as if she put her personal life on hold, and had moved out of it only long enough to impart her love of language on those of us who shared it in the classes she taught. I learned to embrace Shakespeare and poetry, understand that novelists could make profound and somewhat prophetic comments on society with books like Farenheit 451, Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm, and realize the power of the pen.

Ma’am was the one who made me embrace reading and writing. It was because of her that I went to university and studied English, and it was her faith in me all those years ago that gave me the courage to write my first book. She’s been gone many years, but my admiration for her never changed, and as a teacher, I did my best to emulate her and foster that same love of English in my students.

Looking forward to reading other answers. You can fins them here: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html