When I was 16 years old, my beloved college counselor told me that it was a good thing I wanted to be a physicist because I wasn’t much of a writer. We were close—I had her home phone number for emergencies—and it wasn’t a mean-spirited comment. She was right—writing was my weak spot. When I went into my frosh exposition class at Harvard six months later, I was understood by the entire seminar to be the worst writer in the class. Peer edits were a struggle; our instructor tried her best. I was a Black working-class student from an underfunded school district, and they treated me with the kind of pity that white liberals understood to be kindness. When I look back on my final essay, I see smart ideas and a writer who could not get comfortable inside of a sentence. I could not find my voice on the page. I was not at home in the figurative, and it showed. We are producing our reality through the stories we choose to tell and the metaphors that we use to narrate them.…