Hiatus & Recent Thoughts
by crescentsoul
I seem to have taken a break from writing here over the past six months or so, but I feel ready to get back to it now, mainly because there’s quite a lot of stuff I want to write about, and also as I can never find the time to hand write a diary, this is a quicker and more easily cathartic option for getting things off my chest. And I have been feeling the need to write things down very strongly as of late, so here I am.
The exact word I’m searching for to describe how I’m doing right now has run away, but to be haphazard and slightly clumsy, I’m probably sad and scared. Many of my best friends from home have gone to University to study creative subjects – be it Illustration, Photography, Fine Art, Graphics, Music, etc – and to see them developing their styles and just creating is so inspiring to me, yet it makes me wish I’d chosen to study a creative subject at University as well.
It was such a difficult decision for me to make, which degree to choose, being torn between English, Fine Art and Photography. I chose English Literature in the end. Presently, I only have a few months left of my degree, so it’s a bit late to be rethinking things now. But I can’t help feeling like I could have been mistaken in thinking I would enjoy studying Literature more.
Maybe I’m feeling this way as University hasn’t been what I expected it to be. It hasn’t offered me room for creative growth, or steps into any particular industry. I haven’t made the circle of bookish friends I thought I would, I haven’t really got close to anyone. I don’t live in a city I like, I feel stifled here, like there’s nothing going on that I care about and that everything is so small and pretentious and pseudo cool when really it’s just plain boring and self-conscious.
I think I know that in my life I want to be involved in a creative industry – writing, art, photography, music – and I know that I want to be successful, but I feel so far away from the door to get my foot in, the door isn’t even in the room, it’s locked and there isn’t a key and it’s ten stories away, and then it’s in a room full of other locked doors that all look the same and how am I meant to know which one to try and put my foot through. So I feel a bit loose and detached, going around in circles, and not really getting anywhere. Not knowing how to get anywhere.
Studying English Literature has been an endless slog of pressurized reading that I largely don’t enjoy, punctuated occasionally – very occasionally – by the inspiration and elation I get when reading something that sparks my imagination. I’ve complained about my degree a lot; I can never keep up with the reading (not that I haven’t tried – it’s just mentally impossible for me to sit and read something that I don’t want to read, can’t read, don’t understand, don’t enjoy, for any prolonged length of time); or, I’ve felt it was just ok, it’s ok, it’s going ok, it’ll be ok, yeah, I’m ok. Any passionate advocation of my degree has been few and far between, and when it happens it’s an intense relief, a sudden affirmation of meaningfulness. A sudden light showing me that what I am doing has a point. That my imagination is still there, that I do still get excited about creating. At times like that I feel so strong and so capable, but then, it goes, the inspiration vanishes, poosh, and I realise I still have that other reading to do which I don’t like and know deep down that I won’t do, so the guilt comes back, and I remember I have no money and it feels like it’ll be this way forever, and I look at my drawings and think how small and alone they are, and I think about all the things I want to do and wonder if I’ll ever get to do any of them. What do I love about my degree? I love 10% of the reading. I love seminars because we get to talk together, and other ways of looking emerge to me and it feels like we’re all in this together, and it’s amazing to muse on the breadth and depth of this collection of words we are looking at. I love lectures, I love the ritual of them, sitting there in my glasses, and I love lectures more now that I can be writing notes so fast my writing looks like complete shit, but I’m still managing to listen to what the lecturer is saying. I used to love getting the train onto campus when I lived near the station, but now I have to get the bus, and I hate that. So anyway, there are times when I feel like what I’m doing is right, basically when I’m on campus with everyone, with the bustle and atmosphere of learning around me. It’s just the week in between where I am left to my own devices that I begin to fail and flap and question my abilities and feel no passion for this huge investment, of my life and time and finances.
I know that Literature is my object of study, and to some extent the subject of your study is always going to be stressful as it’s framed by academia and hoops to jump through. So I am aware of the grass is always greener syndrome, where I’m imagining studying something else and picturing it more enjoyable and more soul-nourishing, and not imagining the real stress of it because how can I know, having never done it, what the stress would be like? I just feel, strongly, that I’m nearly a graduate, and what will I do afterwards, where will I go? where can I go? how have I been prepared by my degree to go forwards? I feel like I’m behind already, behind the starting blocks, I’m not ready to move in any of the directions I want to go. I know that I’m young but I also feel scared that I’m not that young and I haven’t even started to move towards my goals, and I don’t even know where to go. I haven’t had the facilities or the teachers or the social group of an arts school so I don’t know how to enter this world, I don’t know where these places and people are in Brighton, I don’t know how to get there, how to meet them.
I just love making art with my friends you know? It feels like you’re part of something. I miss it. I miss working in a studio and working on big canvases, paintings. I miss sculpture, making clay sculptures. I miss colour and shapes and texture. I miss playing the piano and learning new ways of playing and expressing myself through music. I miss the darkrooms at college and the days I spent in their developing photos, all of us noticing each others work, encouraging each other, doing shoots together. I just miss expressing myself. I can’t deal with not expressing myself. At the moment, it’s not really happening. I can’t find a way to really get into in a Literature essay, minus the times I talked about poetry and art. Ah, for fuck’s sake.
c r e s c e n t s o u l 
I know how you feel. In that I’ve always had many interests and when you get into higher education you have to focus on just one and it seems kind of arbitrary…. but also I’ve realised that doing the creative things I love just because I love them is fine. Great, in fact. Possibly even better than studying them – I might not get to immerse myself in the all-consuming academic revelling in those particular fields but I also don’t have the stress of enforced creativity (I did have a creative aspect to my BA and it sucked all my inspiration and desire to write creatively out of me). I think to a certain extent you always have a love/hate relationship with the thing that’s the central occupation of your life… just don’t get trapped in thinking your BA is the end of it all, or that you’re supposed to come out of it with some kind of epiphany about where you’re going and what you’re doing.
You’re still younger than I was when I even started my undergrad and I’ve never known what I was doing! I did my BA because after a few years of full-time work the opportunity to dedicate all my time to studying felt like a massive luxury. And it was. Hard work, but so much more pleasurable and enriching than the alternative. I don’t think an undergrad does, or is meant to, equip you with a specific set of qualifications (or at least not a humanities one…) but the advantage of that is that you get tons of transferrable skills that work in any context and that will be valuable to you whatever you turn your hand to in the future. In some ways I think university was mis-sold as a guarantee of some kind of ‘success’ and the student life depicted as this all-fun-all-the-time type thing. In reality both things are what you make of them and depend hugely on the institution you go to and the course you undertake and how much and in what ways you engage with the experience.
I guess I want to say just don’t worry. Maybe because that’s what I’d like to say to my past self. You’ve got so much time and things will become clearer (if not completely clear…). You can’t know whether doing something different would have made you happier or what the consequences would have been so trust that there is a reason you did this and a reason you are doing it and it is taking you somewhere you need to be but you won’t be able to see that until afterwards. It’s all bits of the puzzle, everything you do and are and experience, and they come together slowly, but even the most obscure and awkward pieces have a place in the big picture somewhere.
Thank you Jess. I really needed to hear that, especially coming from someone who understands and has been here before! It’s relatively good talking to the other girls on my course but we always just end up moaning and wondering what the hell we’re doing or what we’ll do afterwards, so you never really get any clearer on the matter as we can’t even conceive of a future perspective. So I really value your thoughts on this and I love everything you say, it’s like hearing what I believe deep down but can’t bring to the surface just yet! You’re right, it’s a luxury to be able to dedicate this much time to learning, and I think I need to realise that this degree is kind of just an opportunity, more than anything, to do so. Not to offer a guarantee of your life ahead, but a chance to immerse yourself in something for a while.
I remember how studying “creativity” completely wrecks it for yourself too, and I stopped doing my Art Foundation precisely because of that reason, so I’m definitely thinking about a degree in Art or Photography with heavily rose tinted spectacles haha. I think it’s the facilities of doing a degree like that that I’d love to have access to, and the atmosphere of everyone expressing things differently all around you, but really, it’s not always like that, and in my experience too, having to create within an academic framework never feels like you’re doing it for your own love of doing it, thus destroying the point in a way. Maybe you’ll feel like creative writing again at some point! Now you can do it how and when you want to! I did a Creative Writing module last year and loved it, except when it came to actually writing stuff of our own – I completely disregarded the boxes you had to tick and wrote this rambling narrative full of oceans and grey skies, and received the worst marks in the history of my degree for it HA. Which sort of made me love it more in a defensive, fuck-you-I-can-write-what-want way.
Anyway, I’m rambling here now as well (it’s a habit). Thank you for your lovely words babe :) lots of love to you x o x o x