Half of my grad school applications are due tomorrow and I’m freaking out. Of course, my brain likes to be distracted and entertained in the midst of such a crisis and therefore we pick up Rory’s camera (which we gave to him as a gift, and which we found out recently that he hacked with some nerve) and shoot away, noting how much longer one can make one’s hair look should one decide to frame the angle a certain way. They are titled ‘biotin’ since that is what I’ve been using to make it super shiny.
If you are a boy reading this, then you think I am crazy. If, however, you are a girl reading this you are agreeing one hundred percent on how hair can be such a topic of focus, discussion, worry, distraction. Hair posts always get the good comments.
This, to distract from how much I love my writing sample even while I hate how personal and vulnerable it feels to upload my poetry onto a server and wait to be judged on ability and potential. I think I have been writing about my fear of not living up to my own potential since around the eighth grade when AP classes started completely boring me out of my mind and I started writing songs and poems with a more serious level of intent. Which is silly, I know I know I know, but how do you say that you know for sure this is the next step and you want to do this for the rest of your life, when really its something you do every day of your life and never think about quantifying?
Of course I want to attend your Creative Writing MFA program and of course I want you know all these great things about me, but goodness there is some serious doubt just under the surface telling me to run into the safe confines of a library or a photography studio, instead. Every plan I can think of feels exactly the same, but writing is something that I know I do well and that I feel I could do better than any other random person I might think of.. in fact, its really helped me get the job that I love, and helped me record some majorly intense parts of my life that would otherwise be lost forever.
I know that when I look at the piles of notebooks, the distilled binders of drafts, and the final writing sample that I have assembled, I feel proud and pretty damn good at the craft of poetry. All of my prose, all of my narrative, all of my memoirs are full of alliteration, illusion, allusion, fantastic vocabulary and mature observation. I don’t think about it, I just do. it. constantly. I obviously have enough ego to continue to do it, to feel a sense of intense pleasure when I read my own writing, and to risk sounding pretentious by opening my mouth all the time in the company of others just to hear words fall off my tongue.
I would love to work for a literary magazine and to become a teacher, of course I would! I’ve already done those things but not to earn a living, and how amazing that programs exist where you learn to do this and develop yourself inside of a community, assuming the community will be of a certain quality and not the typical writing group or other type of workshop where I hate every one else’s writing (sorry but there is my ego).
I don’t know what to say about my writing, though. As I said last night, “As much as I love talking about myself, I cannot put it down on paper in an official document and just send it in.”
Fears of: change, failure, rejection, the other choices that will not be made if I choose this one, the future, money, location, having too many things I want to do. Should I mention some extremely personal details that make me a more interesting person or should I play it safe instead?
Okay, seriously, back to Statements of Purpose and biting my nails now, because the four page document I typed out may just as well have been written by a six year old.
