I moved from Illinois to Florida to attend an MFA program in creative writing, where I received a fellowship to attend. I experienced some culture shock, going from a culturally diverse community to a white, culturally insular student body. I have noticed that as a writer who is also a black woman, there are questions that my white counterparts don’t have to face in this environment.

In my first semester of grad school, I took a nonfiction class where we had writing workshops. It takes a lot of guts to put your story into the hands of strangers for their critique. Yet this nerve-wracking experience can be a very enlightening, even uplifting experience.

I wrote and shared my painful experience of turning 18 on Christmas Day, where I was accidentally left outside in an unfamiliar, small airport terminal by my father. I ended up having to hitchhike home.

My mentally ill father didn’t check the terminal to see if it would be open on a major holiday. I didn’t consider him mentally ill back then - the illness was undiagnosed. So I just thought that his behavior was only eccentric and odd. That’s just who he was to me.

I felt the story was pretty universally understandable - a child dealing with a mentally ill parent, thinking that was just how he was, and believing that this was normal, healthy behavior.

What I wasn’t expecting was the reaction from some classmates. In a non-fiction workshop - where I wrote about a personal experience, and can’t change the facts - I was questioned whether my experience occurred the way that I experienced and wrote about it. Some classmates could not take my own word for my own past. Historically, black writers have had to have white people vouch for their stories (e.g. slave narratives) to be taken seriously. I don’t know if I was touching that third rail, or if they were. Either way, I was shocked by how closely they scrutinized my true story.

Then, a couple of my classmates blamed me for not knowing the terminal would be closed on a holiday. Even though it was my first time to this small airport, and even though I was a teen, according to them it was my responsibility to take care of myself. I was appalled and disappointed. My teacher chimed in, “Yeah, I found that odd, too…”

Inside, I was livid. How could they blame me, a child (at the time), for my father’s negligence? I sat in my seat, half looking at my classmates, and half looking at what I wrote, and shook inside with the abandonment, loneliness, and shame that I felt on that cold, wintry day. It’s like I had traveled back to that moment but now I had random strangers pointing their fingers at me. I didn’t want to cry — I wanted to scream. I was reliving that horrible day all over again, all cold with the wind whipping through my ears, my fingers going numb, feeling that heavy, existential dread. Except this time I was surrounded by unsympathetic strangers.

Most of the classmates expressed fear for the story “me”, hitchhiking on Christmas Day - as they should have. Yet it only took about three women, all white and above the age of 30, to ruin what would have been a decent workshop experience. Since then, my workshops, which have had mostly white audiences, have been challenging, although I have been able to grow as a writer.

A recent study has shown that people assume that black people feel less pain than white people. Basically, the black experience is already marked by injustice from racism, so how much more painful can being left outside on your birthday really be? My experience doesn’t fit into the mold of the typical black experience, so my classmates assumed that my pain on that day was somehow less than if the story belonged to someone else.

All of this is happening on an unconscious level. But when I write, I aim for universal truths that can be felt and understood by everyone. I am challenged to improve a story if readers don’t get it. So the lack of diversity in my program shouldn’t be a deterrent or obstacle. There may have been legitimate flaws in my story: it could have been that I didn’t show my father to be mentally ill enough. Or it could have been that my classmates are not really acquainted with how mental illness plays out in families.

I am plagued by this rampant self-doubt as I ask these questions; this is how I live with double consciousness, of thinking about how people see me along with how I see myself. It’s an extra alter ego that my white classmates inadvertently evoked, and by which they will never be haunted.