WRITING PROMPT

My Favorite Teacher Ran a Sex Fetish Club and Unveiled the Writer Within

When sex sells the writing process

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In 8th grade, I was fourteen years old and living in Asia with my family.

I attended an English school that was purposely built for the children of the expatriates. The students came from all over the globe: Australia, England, Canada, the USA, and so much more.

The teachers were also expats, most originally from the UK.

Living in the most multicultural society opens your eyes to many different things. You learn about other cultures, and you come to understand different upbringings and different ways of life.

It’s the best sociological experience I can think of!

I always saw my school years as a means to an end

I knew I had to attend to finish and be able to follow my own path afterward. Still, I wasn’t particularly focused on the learning side of school.

The school days were just a vessel through which I could at first make friends; having arrived as a new kid from Australia, it was the only way to meet people.

Then, over time, it was all about the social aspect for me.

I selected subjects I knew would be easy or have classes full of my friends

In 8th grade, I chose electives such as Home Economics, a wasted experience where you learn to cook.

I also selected Office Studies, a weekly typing tutoring lesson, a class that was impossible to fail!

I also took a class called CDT, which stands for Craft, Design, and Technology. I didn’t utilize any of those skills, and I only chose that subject because all the good-looking boys took it, too!

However, I did not get out of the core subjects of math, history, and English.

I hated math and still do it to this day. History and English turned out to be where I found a new part of myself.

Coincidentally, I had the same teacher for both subjects

We’ll call her “Mrs. S.”

Mrs. S was a terse woman from Ireland, Scotland, or Wales. She had wild, natural gray hair and was the most enthusiastic teacher of English I’d ever seen.

She wouldn’t just discuss the novels we had to study in the class, she would become lost in the characters’ narratives and was borderline obsessive about requesting that we students find ways to apply our own experiences to those of the characters in the novels.

She wasn’t satisfied to hear an answer such as, “I get it, I feel the same.”

Mrs. S kept probing to discover why we felt a certain way and how we could understand the protagonists.

She was also a drama teacher, which explained a lot.

As English was a core subject, the grade a student received held more weight than the elective subject we had to take.

So when Mrs. S explained our major assignment tasks for each term, they had to be taken seriously, unlike the rubbish I must have produced in CDT!

Our assignment was to take the themes of the novel we had been studying in class and write an essay explaining how our life experiences were reflected in the theme.

I don’t recall spending much time on the task

Like all my schoolwork, I practiced going straight home and completing my assignments as fast as possible so I would have more time to socialize and not worry about due dates!

The due date to hand in the assignments arrived, and I gave mine to Mrs. S and didn’t give it another thought.

Over the week, Mrs. S called upon certain students who must have written the best essays to read their assignments in front of the class.

I was pretty happy she didn’t call me. I wasn’t a kid who ever journaled or kept a diary, so I didn’t have such high hopes of receiving such a high mark.

During the last English class that week, Mrs. S asked me to stay after class to discuss something

As usual, I expected to be reprimanded for being disruptive or for not respecting the students who were reading by staying quiet.

I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

The other students raced out as the bell rang, and Mrs. S approached my desk and sat opposite me with my assignment in her hand.

My internal dialogue said, “Here we go; it’s terrible, and she will make me re-do it, possibly at lunchtime.”

I suffered from a bad case of teenage attitude!

She began asking me questions.

“Do you write a lot outside of school work?” asked Mrs S.

“no”.

Mrs. S kept asking questions, “Do you enjoy writing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me about your thought process when you wrote this piece.”

I was thinking to myself, Jeez, lady, you are a relentless pain in the ass with all your questions.

I realised the questions were not going to stop until I co-operated.

I finally replied, “Mrs. S, I’m going to be honest with you; I don’t have a process. I took the assignment, went home, and wrote it the same day; it may have taken me an hour at most. I pressed CTRL S so my work was saved, and I printed it out the day before I handed it in to you.”

I wanted her to be shocked or at least feel I had answered her questions enough to let me leave the classroom.

She was shocked but not at my answer.

Mrs. S was shocked that I could write the assignment quickly and produce one of the greatest works she has received from a student in her many years of teaching. (Her words.)

She understood that my piece did not need to be read aloud to the class

The words were not written to showcase anything more than my thoughts, which were not up for public discussion.

Mrs. S saw in my assignment that I had written for myself.

Mrs. S was the first person who called me a writer.

I wasn’t so sure I believed her, as at the age of fourteen, I had high self-doubt and never prioritized my schoolwork.

She told me I had a writing talent and that writing would help me in my life, as it seemed to come to me so effortlessly.

It would be years before I wrote again for reasons other than school assignments.

During my teen years, I didn’t make time for self-reflection, and I was dealing with a chaotic home life.

Throughout my school years, even after we left Asia and I completed my schooling back in Australia, I continued to get very high grades in any subject that involved writing.

It never occurred to me that writing could become a career or a way to earn money

I never showed anyone what I wrote. I never asked anyone to read anything I created.

I still don’t.

I opened my laptop on a flight back from a family holiday

I started to write about my experience staying at a Club Med resort.

I had been considering starting a travel blog aimed at helping people with young families gain advice when traveling.

I remember discussing the idea with my husband, who thought it was a great idea. Given that I had traveled to so many places in my life, he believed I could generate a lot of helpful content.

So I wrote that first blog, which inspired me to write another about the best things to pack when on vacation with kids straight after it.

After that one, I wrote another and another and another.

Within a few weeks, I had a folder on my laptop with hundreds of blog articles ready to edit and publish. The only issue was that I didn’t have a website or digital online presence to publish my work.

After much blood, sweat, and frustrated tears, I created a Wix website and my travel blogging space.

The website was beautiful. I was so proud of the design. The colors popped off the page.

I never published it.

Thinking back to that time, my self-doubt had crept back in.

I was not a writer. What business did I have writing about anything that could be deemed helpful for anyone? Why should anyone read my stuff?

In my head, it was just a waste of time.

Until it wasn’t.

Over the years, the people in my world would always contact me when planning a holiday or embarking on traveling to a new destination.

They wanted to know what I would recommend, what areas would have amenities, and what airline routes would be the least stressful.

I always had content to pass on to them. I always gave them extra information.

I started receiving calls and emails from friends of friends asking for similar resources, so I started sending them my unpublished blog posts.

The response was so positive!

What was interesting to me was that, as much as people commented that they found the information helpful, they loved how I wrote in a way that spoke to them even more. They discovered my information to be easy to understand and even more straightforward to implement.

People said the articles were humorous but informative. Gathering all the information was more accessible than clicking through many different websites.

My confidence started to grow, and I enjoyed the writing process so much that I started writing about other topics

I started writing about my life, family, and history.

I wrote about television shows, films, pop culture, social media, and building and failing at a startup.

I started posting links to my articles on my social media.

Along with that came more positive feedback.

The responses of those who were closest to me were always supportive.

Without realizing it, my writing sparked conversations among people at dinner tables.

However, as wonderful as it was to receive positive feedback and encouragement from the people I love, it was the people who contacted me who I didn’t know—the strangers to me—who read my work and reached out to tell me that something I wrote resonated with them that filled my soul.

Once, I was even approached at a coffee shop by a girl I didn’t know who had stopped to tell me how much she enjoyed my articles. She had read a few of my pieces about experiencing postnatal depression, and those stories of my experiences resonated with her.

It was these types of responses that inspired me to keep writing.

Then I found Medium.

ADEOLA SHEEHY-ADEKALE asked us to look into the theme of the writing process and what it means to be a writer.

Until I saw this writing prompt, I had never given my process much thought.

Looking back at my journey from someone who happened to have a talent for writing to becoming someone who loves to write, I now can see that my process is just that — a lack of process!

I write because I love it.

I write to organize the ideas that flow through my head and help me think clearly.

I write to say things I can’t say out loud.

I write to gain clarity where there is nothing but fog.

Sometimes, I get an idea and feel an overwhelming necessity to sit at my laptop and type out all my thoughts on the screen.

I have my best ideas for when I’m in the shower or on the toilet.

I write for me.

*To illustrate just how my flow operates, I’d like to explain that when I started writing this article, it was supposed to be about my teacher, Mrs. S, and how she was the first person to recognize my love of writing.

I wanted to tell the story of how, years later, I went to look her up online so I could reach out to her and tell her how much her support had actually helped me.

I wanted to thank her.

Instead of finding her details, I discovered that a few years after I graduated, she had been arrested for operating a BDSM sex fetish club. All the charges ended up being dismissed, but despite the scandal, Mrs. S went on to dedicate herself to mental health advocacy as the chairwoman of a 24-hour multilingual suicide prevention hotline.

Furthermore, Mrs. S became a certified counselor specializing in sexual and gender diversity.

Mrs. S always emphasized the importance of finding joy and pleasure in life. She was committed to understanding human behavior in teaching, and in this discovery of mine, I certainly saw her in a new light.

Mrs. S sought to bring out the best in people and identify ways for them to find a happy place that would impact their mental health.

I thank her for discovering the writer inside of me, and I now see that there were never any correct answers to her questions. She just wanted us students to expose our stories from our hearts, and as a writer, I now get to do that daily.