Atisbos

Doubt and Erasure

I dropped out of community college soon after graduating high school. A pretty common pattern, but one that I nonetheless went through. It's hard to express how I felt then, but I know I was alone, depressed, and lost. I hadn't figured myself out nor had the space to do so.

Eventually, I did figure some part of me out and when I went back to college, I found I did a lot better in my classes. But my life had changed dramatically and my socio-economic position was unstable in many ways. Like many, my decision to pursue a degree was out of economic necessity and in some ways a pressing matter. I wanted to major in chemistry back then but the timelines for doing so meant I would potentially need to take out a student loan to finish and I wasn't sure if I would even be able to stay in the same place to complete my degree in time or that if I got the degree, I would have access to employment afterwards. I chose to major in English instead.

I don't regret the decision, it ultimately led to many great things. I'm doing so much better now: I'm safe now, I found love, I'm starting to feel hopeful about my future. And yet, I feel a tinge of self-chastisement, like I need to answer the judgements from an alternate timelines where I did choose chemistry. I get the sense I should feel like I settled for a degree or a pressure to prove the worth and value of my decisions. I think it's an effusive criticism.

One makes any decision and life shakes its head with shoulds and oughts.

I sometimes think of Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken. A high school teacher introduced the poem to me and asked for my interpretation sometime in my senior year. I had the common conclusion, the poem is saying: our choices matter and it's worthwhile to choose the less travelled road, that road being some fictitious 'higher ground' in my mind then.

I don't think it's a foolish way to read it. The poem opens itself up to be read in two opposing ways. The second reading is that: we're so quick to fool ourselves in our choices. It was this belief that I felt the most as I changed majors, because I couldn't shake that I was making a decision that wasn't wholly mine, I chose it out of necessity.

Life doesn't care what we choose or if we felt conviction when we chose it. And if you take a step back and think about it, the best decisions we make seldom require conviction or surety. But my thought pattern is a con, a deciever, a false-believer. It took my perfectly fine decision: get a degree in something fun and interesting and it just tore me down.

Doubt crept up in many ways: I felt like I let my stem professors down, I felt like I let down the part of me that dropped out, I felt like I wasn't choosing something useful (It's easy to buy into the idea that humanity degrees have no value in society).

I think when I fell back into feeling alone and lost, I would try to imagine where I would be if I had chosen differently. (It wasn't a good way of coping, I know.) It took me forever to finally stop and accept that comparison is the thief of joy. and no amount of shoulds and oughts would vindicate me of my choices. But in order to get there I had to see how my mind was self-censuring my self-expression.

Site of Grace

I kind of always had an interest in writing, it was an easy outlet as a kid because I could always destroy the evidence. I could see, touch, and hear the words as something fully mine and that made the internal external. Writing made a lot of the hurt feel like it really did exist, it helped me think about things, it helped find someone to talk to when no one else would listen.

But writing as an adult has been a completely different experience. I lived most of my childhood being chastised for my interests and expressions. I internalised those voices. I had a revelation a few weeks back that I get a lot of analysis paralysis, but the analysis is always centered around other people's utility over my own. And I guess writing has been no different.

Coming into an English major I did find a lot of people interested in my writing and a lot of support for writing. My professors were all kind and supportive. It was a complete 180 from what I had experienced before. But I never got so far enough to publish anything.

And I think part of it was that my professors all wanted me to write about my identity, my identity being unique and in their eyes marketable. They had warm and kind intentions, but the actual work that it would take to publish that side of me was too much and I never could get myself to do it. My hearts just not in it to share that with the world.

Funny thing, it didn't occur to me that this wasn't the only thing I could write about. I had taken the guidance of my professors to heart and when you juxtapose it against the folly of choice narrative and the internalised self-censuring and the way humanity majors are valued, you could see how and why I struggled.

After I graduated I got it in my head that the best path to getting myself to publish something was to assemble all the poems I had written into a chapbook. I was unfortunately following along the bad logic that always stopped me from ever submitting any work: I was doing this to prove that my degree was worthwhile but instead I found myself overwhelmed by the silence of that space.

I could never convince myself that my major was the right choice because the comparison was impossible: a path in chemistry I never took against an absence of conviction in swapping to English.

And the thing is, by all accounts I actually really loved my classes. I enjoyed everything about them: the reading, the writing, the class discourse, the people I met, the things I wrote, how it all changed me.

I still have the chapbooks stored on a hard drive somewhere. Most might be a pretty cringe, a lot of them are very sad. HOWEVER I'm choosing to be kind to my past, present, and future self!

I wanted to publish them in the past. But I was always afraid. It's hard. It takes time and effort. And at the end, there's this little piece of you that you have to be okay with giving to the world, a world that might have been pretty unfair to you.

Some of the poems I wrote are actually still very pretty, even in the cringe. I don't know if I still consider myself a poet, but I would like to try. And I think I would like to write again. I'm uncertain if I want to try and publish these poems now. I'm thinking maybe a few that still meet my mark. But those poems are not all I'm capable of writing so it doesn't make sense for them to be all I focus on.

Coming to my laptop and sitting down on a blank document, I see a pitch black reflection asking me what I want to write about. It's a hard question for me still, but everyday I feel like an answer is coming to me. I think I want to try my hand at some prose, some poems. I'm going to write about a character I've been thinking about and see what comes up.

Thanks for joining me, see you again in the next post!