I think I have honestly come to the conclusion that I will never make freshly pressed. Not for my lack of trying, or the work I put into a post, but because of my writing style.
I am reminded of my younger years. I used to write a lot and create lots of different stories. I always had one problem, everything I wrote about seemed to come from this dark scary place that, even in some horror movies, it may be edited out because its too scary. That and one other thing
Audience I present to you my problem. I cannot actually properly write or in fact spell.
From a child that had much promise, my teenage life became a huge struggle and I was in and out of hospital, therapy, and at home. My attendance at school wasn’t the greatest, and in fact by school actually encouraged me not to attend some classes because the teachers didn’t have time to deal with me.
I wasn’t a naughty child, I was in fact quiet. I was however bullied a shit load, and the teachers couldn’t be bothered to handle it. I used to explain to them that focusing was hard, and that I couldn’t understand, but they thought I was causing trouble.
Now fast forward ten years later, when I was finishing my courses on peer education and art leadership. My tutor, and assessor was going through my course work and turned round and asked the one question no one had actually asked me
How long have you known that you are dyslexic?
I was honest, I said that I didn’t understand why she was asking me that, and she had said that going through all my work, you could clearly see that I was. That my wording and writing structures only made sense if you were reading them out, and as written work it was a struggle to work with. She then set me in front of the computer, turned off the spelling and punctuation settings and told me to write my case study on a life as a trans person.
She then turned it back on whilst I had finished. The amount of red was shocking. She explained that she had thought I has it for quite a while, but didn’t question because I had never brought it up. The fact was , was that I had never known.
Its been a few years now since I have found out about it. And in all honesty, I haven’t let it change who I am, though I understand why I am slower than people my age. Its put me at ease, that I also know that I’m not alone also.
The downside has been that, after a long time I have decided to tale up attempting to write again. I do it on my phone, making sure that auto correct is on, so I make minimal mistakes. My other flaw I know is that when it comes to writing, I just write exactly what comes to my mind, without a pause for thought. So this ends up with several long sentences and the odd swears.
So this is why I basically will never end up on freshly pressed. There are many many writers out there who write much better content then I could even imagine. And I know that my style comes off in a way that’s crude, almost basic and at a level I could never compete with. Regardless though, I’m still going to keep trying, whether zero people read my content or a million, its my style, and I’m trying to improve as much as I can.
So, since I write this, freshly pressed is no longer a thing on WordPress. Turns out I never made it on there, but now they have Discover, which is the same. The content seems a little more adult but I still think it will be a thing that doesn’t happen with me.
Tyler Charles Austen 