Allie Grenon

My Evolution

     Have you ever heard the phrase, “seeing stars”? It’s actually kind of ridiculous to think you could get hit hard enough to see twinkling lights in front of your eyes. I’m here to tell you seeing stars is a very real thing, and I only happen to experience it after sustaining a right hook to the face. (By Hyemee. This is important, because I wouldn’t get hit like that by anyone else. She’s that good). But let me back up, before I won not one but two National Championships, before I stepped into the ring, before I knew how to truly experience happiness, let’s go back to me, BB (before boxing). My life, my confidence in myself, in my writing, was laughable and arguably still is, but hopefully in a different way. Therefore, sit back, get a snack, and buckle your seatbelts, because I’m going to tell you about my evolution.

     I think to truly delve into my evolution as a writer, I need to talk about my evolution as a person as well. The two are intrinsically connected to me. When I first got to college, I was a skinny, 18 year old nerd, and now I’m a boxing machine (but still a nerd so not everything changes). A lot does change, though. I went from being reserved and withdrawn to being confident and sometimes a little too loud for my own good. I went from people pleaser to self pleaser (yeah that sounds dirty but you know what I mean, not masturbation, just approbation). I think for the first time in my life, I’ve learned to be real. People will love you or hate you regardless of what you do so you might as well be as genuine as possible, because at the end of the day, what other choices do you have? Be fake and miserable? Hold your tongue and miss opportunities? Stop grinding to achieve what you want? Cheesy, but accurate: the number one thing I’ve learned as a person, as a writer, is to be authentic.

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Allie BB (Before Boxing)

    That being said, I spent a lot of time my freshman year hiding my writing skills in the realm of strict scientific writing. I dove into research papers and the world of science. That suddenly became all I would write, all I thought I could write. Oh scientific writing, you were an unyielding, succinct genre and in a lot of ways reflected who I was at the time. I believed in certain rules, remaining in a box I had cut out for myself, not daring to go beyond, not engaging in self-reflection. I had to get straight A’s, I had to be the perfect friend, I had to have my life completely together 100% of the time, or at least keep up that appearance. My world was so black and white: if you don’t get an A you might as well have failed, if you aren’t there for your friends constantly, then you’re not a good friend, or even a good person. The thought of who I was was simply too scary to face, so I hid under a mountain of scientific bullshit and pretended to love it. The thing about bullshit is that at one time or another, you begin to smell it.

    My sophomore year I broke out of my little turtle shell of science-y things that I was wanting to love, but secretly loathed, and took a creative writing course. Here is an example of a poem I wrote:             

                    

The Truth About the Glass Slippers

                    

When I dropped the box

Of vintage heels onto the new Sparkling black tile

Instantly the image of Cinderella And her infamous glass shoes Was jammed into my mind

                    

You probably remember this tale She magically goes to the ball in the Unrelenting dazzling shoes

Meets Prince Charming

Loses a shoe

He searches for her

Finds her using the shoe

Living

Happily

Ever

After

Right?

                    

Wrong

The real story

By the Grimm brothers

Goes a little something like this

                    

Cinderella

Meets the man of her dreams

Wearing what else than the practical glass slippers They dance

They fall in love

She loses the shoe

                    

The prince then

In his infinite wisdom

Tries to force

A glass shoe

Onto every maiden in the kingdom Giving no fucks when

He shaves down a heel here

Cuts off a toe there

The common welfare of his people Should not get in the way

Of finding his true love

Of course                            

                    

Girls screaming

Blood filling the slipper at

Every residence with an Unfortunate large footed daughter Chunks of flesh left behind

As the prince continues his Vicious hunt

                    

I bet that’s something Disney won’t tell you

                    

Helping to clean up the shoes off the piercing black glass background I pick up a faded peach one

She picks up a lavender stiletto

Peripheral vision spotting a green, blue wedge

                    

I grab a cream wedding shoe Pondering why in

The world

There are so many people

Who believe Cinderella is a story with A

                    

Happy Ending?

 

End of poem.

     So let’s all agree that’s some pretty fucked up content, am I right? So here I am, little sophomore, struggling with big world problems, writing my scientific crap in order to hide how I am truly feeling about most things until I get to my creative writing course every Tuesday and Thursday. The truth is I felt dark. I felt dark the majority of high school, freshman and sophomore years of college and the honest to God truth is I was keen on making sure no one saw through my facade.

     Allie, what do you wanna be when you grow up? “Oh definitely a Ph.D.” As if a Ph.D is THE sole identity I should have, I’d answer without hesitation while internally screaming as I was dooming my life to one reduced to something I wasn’t passionate about. This is not to offend anyone with a Ph.D., cough cough Shelley cough cough, because all the people with Ph.D.’s that I am lucky enough to know are super incredible, inspirational and absolutely amazing, cough cough mainly talking about Shelley here cough cough. I simply say this because it isn’t where my heart was, my heart was never truly invested in scientific academia, but I felt so much pressure from everyone else. And as I struggled through being a natural born people pleaser, I wanted to make everyone else happy by striving to achieve what they thought I was capable of: obtaining that doctorate certificate.

     I decided to apply to the minor in writing on a whim. It’ll help your research, I told myself. You’ll bring a new perspective to the minor. You like to write, right? But I didn’t understand how this program would completely change my life (sounds cheesy and no, Sweetland is not paying me). I entered the minor a dopey little sophomore in my second semester, barely staying afloat in school, and I began the Gateway course. I began to enjoy school again before and after each writing course that semester. (My Gateway project can be found here if you’re curious but here’s your warning, it’s fairly dry material minus the chaos I included from my creative writing course). This is still Allie BB so I had a lot of growth yet to accomplish.

     When I finally asked myself, what the hell do you want, Allie? (Flashback to a completely unrelated scene from The Notebook movie where Ryan Gosling is screaming, “What do you want, Allie?” at Rachel McAdams). I decided I needed to get real. And I know I sound like a broken record with boxing this and boxing that, but boxing not only helped me out of my darkness, it completely changed my life and made me who I am today.

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Allie AB (After Boxing)

     I began boxing at the end of my sophomore year which was a good step because 95% of the people in my life didn’t approve, but it was the first thing that had made me feel pure, unadulterated joy. People would tell me to quit daily, disagreed with it by the hour, but for the first time in my life, I said no. I said no because this is what I want to do. It doesn’t seem like a revolutionary statement, but it was to me. Boxing gave me inner strength I never knew I had, it gave me grit, determination, it helped me dig down into the deepest parts of my soul and discover what I am actually capable of, which is so much more than I ever thought. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t trying to hide my own sadness or darkness in an unhealthy relationship with a boyfriend or dysfunctional friendships that I would pour everything into and get very little in return. I felt like I didn’t need anything else; I became my own person and had a team of incredibly emotionally healthy people standing behind me. And I’ve never felt alone since. It’s my team and I against the world. I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and realized I am the best version of myself I have ever been and that should be attributed to my participation in boxing.

Empowered.

Confident.

Take no prisoners.

    My junior and senior years, my writing evolved with the AB version of me. The internal darkness was shifted into a brilliant light of multicolor. Everything I did had more voice. More personality. More Allie. Less and less shadows of the Allie I had been BB. Parts of Allie BB remained and bled into the AB Allie, thus forcing me to become more gray and no longer sticking to the harshness of black and white. I became more understanding, more flexible. Rules no longer existed to the same extreme as before, and this poured out into my writing. I played with every genre imaginable. Sometimes it turned out great! Other times it turned into a big, old pile of T-Rex poop like in Jurassic Park, still valuable because like the cell phone in the middle of the pile, there was still a sentence or two in the piece I could see as useful. You see, as generically commonplace as it seems, I didn’t just become a new version of a writer. I became a new person and that influenced my writing in every facet imaginable. This essay, this portfolio, and my capstone project are all crystal clear evidence marking not only my evolution as a person, but my extensive evolution as a writer.

    Therefore, my capstone project is based off the love of my young life, which is boxing. I hoped to educate others about the sport, especially since women have only been officially sanctioned to participate since 1993, while men have fought since the dawn of time or for those of you who like technicalities, 4000 BC. (Check out the full details of the History of Boxing here and introduce yourself to the sport, the podcast will then be much more coherent). Relatively still revolutionary, there are a lot of biases towards women in the sport. My capstone project attempts to open a discussion and educate a general audience to these biases through interviews with two of my female teammates. Together, we share our perspectives about the sport through the podcast titled, “Women Vs. Boxing”. I hope you enjoy listening to this and checking out my portfolio, and thanks for sticking with me through my extensive, ever-changing evolution.