learning to create with something to lose

by shan rao

I spent the majority of my first year in college convinced I was going to fail out. This is not a new story: if you know me well, I’ve probably mentioned it, and if not, you’ve probably met someone in a similar position. New story: perhaps this all-consuming fear is what gifted me with a temporarily rigorous creative life. 

You see, if I was destined to ultimately fail and be banished from this college life, I figured I might as well get as much out of it as I could while I was there. After all, I had nothing to lose. Somehow, in this strange and exhausting state, I began to write constantly, poems everyday and hundreds of pages of prose and screenplays. Now, I find myself feeling torn away from that drive: the prospect of this constant writing daunts me, and I find myself wordless in front of an empty document more days than not. Somehow, I’ve been trapped in a backwards tide of creativity. 

This isn’t the first time I’ve found myself like this: once, back in high school, I found myself floating after completing a long project that had consumed two years of my life. Treading water then, I barely wrote a thing for months. As I read articles online, this seemed to be normal. No one wants to tell you it will happen twice—or more.

As a freshman, I found myself writing without expectation from myself or others. I’m not sure how to get back to that: now, I analyze each word I write—the ethics, the voice. No longer does each poem I write feel full of unbridled potential. 

The problem is that perhaps someone would call this “being more realistic”—and maybe that’s true. After all, every poem that an overtired freshman writes from the speckled tile floors under her bed will not become something great, but it can become something because the sheer act of writing words and putting them into the world is a making of something that has never existed before. I want to create without boundaries, without my own expectation.

I sit down to write this blog post without expecting it to be anything extraordinary, and in a way, through my writing it, it is. Not because I’m saying anything that hasn’t been said before or because the words I’m writing have any extraordinary brilliance but because I’ve simply put words down, pinned down feelings and anecdotes with my 78 wpm typing on a slightly greasy Macbook Air (taking typing tests was a way of procrastinating writing my own words, after all). 

I’m not in the business of telling overly romanticized and inspiring stories; I hardly find them useful anyways, and I don’t claim to have the solution to my own understanding of writing. I know I started reading a lot more beautiful books in the past few years, thanks to some people I met and an overly long list of holds at the New York Public Library. There could be plenty of reasons for why I’ve begun to understand my own position as a writer in a new way; we can’t all be buoyed imposters forever. 

I suppose that, now, I am learning to create beyond this conception of having nothing to lose. I am learning that in order to write I must open myself up to this loss and continue in spite of it: a new challenge.

I do know that my writing now is better than it was before, in spite of my lessening belief in its purpose. Like a tree, my earliest rings are the widest; now, I move more slowly, less noticeably moving outward. But I will still grow. I will discipline myself to write and try not to rush myself. I may have gotten too wrapped up in staying ahead of some imaginary curve that I forgot about the importance of time, like the way that spice sets in a tupperware in the fridge. I’ll try to banish these phantom statistics from my mind, watch the dotted lines beside me begin to round slowly instead.