I’ve always pushed back against what I love doing.

When I was about twelve years old, people would ask my mom what my “thing” was. She always said “writer.” I always cringed. Who wants to be a writer? Not Hannah ! She wants to do something cool and interesting!

Fast forward to a 25-year-old Santos who finally thinks writing is cool and interesting—perhaps because she’s scribbled her way through two writing degrees—a Bachelor of Arts in film and literature, and an MFA in screenwriting, At this point, any anti-writing sentiment is rather awkward at best.

After working in journalism, writing novellas, and screenplays, and eventually realizing writing is my preferred activity whenever there is a lull in life, I’ve accepted that yes, Mama was right. I AM a writer.

This fall will mark one whole year as a writing teacher at Houston Baptist University—a wonderful place. I started as an adjunct instructor in the narrative arts and cinema department and now work as full-time time faculty.

However, though I love teaching, it’s hard for me to admit it. I feel very on-brand with childhood Hannah who wrote all the time but did not call herself a writer. When people ask about my profession now, I quickly announce, “Writer!” and not “teacher,” or “professor.”

Part of this is just switching careers from film full time (being on sets, editing, working on scripts, interviewing people), and learning my place inside academia. However, another part of this is dishonesty. While some writers teach ONLY because they have to support themselves, I’m not like that. I’ve always wanted to teach.

The first memory I have of wanting to be a teacher is related to the Amazing Ally dolls. If you don’t know what an Amazing Ally doll is, it is an 18” doll that came out in the 2000s. She would have a computer chip in her pale plastic hand, and you would play trivia games related to the doll’s career. My sister got the normal Ally doll, but I had my heart set on teaching Amazing Ally. She looked like a teacher and had classroom accessories.

I cried when I received a regular Amazing Ally doll and not a teacher kit. Additionally, one of the reasons I wanted a Molly American Girl doll was because I thought, in her sweater vest, braids, and round glasses, she looked like a teacher.

Maybe it’s genetic.

Education is in the bloodline (although so is law school and clown school, so who’s to say, really). My grandfather and my uncle both taught. My attorney dad teaches criminal law when he isn’t getting criminals parole. Mama, though she “never, ever, ever,” wanted to be a teacher, homeschooled me and my three other siblings all the way through high school. I’d sit and watch her teach my sister better than any special ed classroom could, pushing my lovely sister more than most people would ever push. In this homeschooling curriculum, my siblings and I were self-taught with supervision once we entered high school, thus preparing us to understand materials without regurgitating them like a robot. Although I never rode a school bus or sat in a classroom until twelfth grade, education textured my sense of normal.

In college, I blossomed! Professors mentored me and pushed me. Hard questions were asked. To Hannah Santos, the world was almost at its most beautiful inside a windowed lecture hall. My poetry classes would make me cry happy tears after class, and I would walk through the hallways touching the cold bricks and feel the warm sun melt through hall windows, songbirds whistling out the natural world.

Black coffee in hand. Oversized checkered button-down. Black boots. Tote bag. Talking to the cats.

Why weren’t all the other students sniffling over King Lear?

Thoughts and ideas swarmed my head to the point that my professors begged me to sleep instead of thinking and writing so much. (“Have you tried camomile tea?” one professor abruptly asked me in the middle of his lecture.)They nurtured me so that I learned critical theory and grew stronger in creative writing. I learned to feel increasingly comfortable not being sure of things all the time—which is a comfort, because when is one ever sure?

Love, support, and an emotional passion pushed me forward into an academic, award-winning nerd (by so much help and God’s grace!). In senior year, with two senior projects finished, I slunk down the halls, thinking of William Blake and Wes Anderson whilst feeling my utter unworthiness to be given the blessing of learning. Right after defending my senior thesis during undergrad (a research paper about William Blake, you best believe), a professor came up to me and told me that I spoke like a professor and should consider the field.

What? A teacher?

The idea sounded great because, at the time, teaching was not my identity. There seems to be a pattern of wanting something else .

I kept the comment in my heart.

When I went to USC a few months later to start my graduate degree in screenwriting, I was again in denial. Instead of telling people, I was a screenwriter, I told everyone that I had no intentions of becoming a screenwriter (here we go again), but a professor.

“I’m getting my doctorate next,” I told them. “Women need to be doctors.”

After graduating from USC, I totally forgot about my first-year claim. My mind was filled with Hollywood lights after seeing one of my screenplays produced! Thankfully, in a story too long to tack onto this one, God plopped me down at Houston Baptist University in Houston, Texas, teaching cinema.

Ask the students what my classes are like, and one of the aspects that flow through is passion.

I read and write regularly, and am emotional about fictional worlds. I see my fellow creatives working, and I watch them with proper awe! It is a world where I am so blessed to work hard on my own projects, and yet nurture other students’ own. Where else could I watch people grow, and fall in love with writing? I am graced with a good work environment and a wonderful time. The students and fellow faculty feel like my family.

Last semester, I had a little “cohort” of undergrad screenwriters that have stuck with me this spring into our own writer’s room production. This summer, I transitioned to teach more in the college’s screenwriting MFA! My department head and film-busy colleagues are amazing.

I can’t say I really know how to “teach” in the way they train you in educational programs—but if critiquing, being excited about things, caring for people, and feeling a true ache to see people blossom into their full potential is what teaching really is…maybe this writer is a teacher, or at least, truly wants to be!

I’m not sure what plans God has for me long-term, but it doesn’t matter right now, as I’d probably deny the obvious agenda at first anyway. Meanwhile, I’m comfortably uncomfortably blessed to be doing things I love, even if I won’t admit it sometimes, for a reason as unexplainable as the beginning of this sentence, for instance.

What a sobering honor to exist around good people who mentor me, listen to me, and believe in me.

Moral of the story, class? Accept what you love, and God will get you there—and even if you don’t accept it, He might get you there anyway!