I'm a Frankenstein

I can’t remember ever putting pen to paper as a child, and I could barely use a computer until high school.  I’d say that’s where I felt a connection to writing first.  I wrote a paper on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  I had a great teacher who taught me the value of writing and how useful it could be. 

The paper focused on a theme in the novel. The monster was not necessarily a monster.  People just made him that way by rejecting him for his sewn-together, gruesome appearance.  In other words, the monster became so in character after learning violence from humans.  The rest of the paper discussed a question about the monster.  Who was the monster, really?  The monster was only cruel after he received cruelty.  Frankenstein created the monster and let it loose without knowledge of the world.  I posed that the true monsters were the people in the novel.  I don’t recall much else, but I remember being proud of the work.  I remember how writing was what allowed me to reach a higher level of thought and reasoning. 

I have written many papers that helped me learn about the world, but I have just recently discovered how creative writing allows me to learn about myself.  Creative writing has become a means to understand my own existence in the larger world.  It also gives me the power to create anything I want including a new world or new creatures.

I can’t help but continue to think back to the question of the monster in my first memorable piece of writing.  It seems writing itself, the act, turns one into a Frankenstein. I am a creator of beings rejected by society.  It’s not their fault.  They lack sufficient skills to survive in the outside world.  It’s not their fault if they get put down and never picked back up.