ABSTRACT
The author helps himself regain confidence in second language writing. He explores his autobiographical self by reflecting on his personal experience of learning to write in English. The author examines the process of how he, as a successful and confident writer in China, became an incompetent writer at the beginning of graduate school in Canada, of how he struggled to “appropriate voices”, and eventually regained his confidence in English. He explores and positions himself, a nonnative Teaching English as a Second Language professional in an English-speaking environment. He describes how he struggled to create a hybrid identity in the process of learning to write in his second language. This process is guided by an underlying assumption that language can be seen as an act of identity and writing as giving voice to that identity. He takes an antiessentialist view of identity, identity is not a fixed personality trait that is independent of the social context, but is socially constructed.
