One Good Paragraph

I've been writing creative pieces during my classes recently - listening and contributing (of course!) but also furiously penning everything from blog posts to goal lists and recipes to try out. It hasn't been easy to get myself to a place where I can write; I have pockets of time and materials and stories to write, but when I declare it Writing Time, I freeze. Performance anxiety. My thoughts are abuzz with stock phrases like 'need to finish, need to work, need to concentrate.'

Forcing creativity doesn't really work, even when you have it pent up. It has to flow out of you - sometimes in a trickle and sometimes in a flood. For me, it means that sometimes I need intense quiet, and sometimes I need my working brain to be distracted by people talking about Virginia Woolf or character development. The trick is to dislodge the creative brain stuff at the same time. My analytical brain gets caught up in its usual dalliances, getting me through school and the next hour of class. Meanwhile, the creative part of me can break from its stable and charge ahead.

It's probably not very respectful, but I hope that my writing teachers will understand.

Thriving on Pressure

Back on campus now, I'm in what I consider a very safe environment; I'm able to take on my everyday roles and feel bonds of community without really having to seek it out. Most people speak English, so I don't need to learn to communicate. We go to our favorite restaurants and know how to work the subway system. Vulnerability isn't forced upon me, as it was in Bangladesh, where everything - right down to the beds we slept on - required adjusting to. But that threshold of vulnerability, I realized, is what keeps me growing. Which means I seek it out here.

An Introspective on Taking Breaks

Apropos of my Tuesday post on the college environment (and to kick off the start of this academic break), I wanted to talk about the extended break I took from creative endeavors for the past few weeks. You might be wondering: "Why talk about taking breaks? It's cool, we all take them." But for me, a break has long indicated some much more troubling factors than just simple lack of interest.

For many years, taking a break for me was a sign of failure. It was a sign that I was giving in to apathy, which is highly related to my bouts with depression over the years. I was excessively busy in high school for just this reason - to stop moving was to stop ignoring my emotions and have to actually deal with them. To stop moving at that point in my life felt like a small step towards death.

It may seem extreme now, but I think young people have the hardest time dealing with their emotions. They haven't been trained to sit with them (as is done in certain therapy techniques) and it often is not encouraged by our culture to cultivate the wide range of emotions we can feel at any given moment. As we grow older, we can internalize these patterns and fall somewhere along a spectrum - the extremes of never acknowledging deep emotions or drowning in them, or perhaps the healthier middle range with a skew towards one side. But when we are young, those patterns are still being felt out and we try to justify our actions with them as best we can. There are many theories on this, but I will keep to my own personal story.

I Feel Like...

...something big is coming.

I'm not sure what yet, but my pent-up creative feelings are ready to explode into something magnanimous and awesome. Stay tuned for more, lovely readers, stay tuned for more.