Checkerboard Classes
School, to me, has been an experience of loathing fun. A sulk where I need to dislike it and bottom my expectations to the floor to truly enjoy the experience of an 8-hour day. I used to do it the most in my elementary school band. I’d pretend I disliked playing the clarinet so long that when I do come to play, I enjoy every second like rediscovering a childhood song.
To an extent, university felt somewhat different. Maybe because everything was online and important, so I only had to look up how to get to downtown Yonindale during the spring when I actually needed to haul a giant watercolour pad on a busy train.
My first year majoring in creative writing felt inspiring and driven, yet vastly empty. Like the edge between a rainforest and a desert. The hills are like fluffy white elephants but I cannot tell you where they are going, just that they are.
Socially, it’s been the quietest desert known to Terris. Being online due to the pandemic meant that it was more convenient, but more isolating. It felt like reading alone in a dark library. I did feel outside of the loop at times. I did feel like I didn’t belong here and didn’t deserve to be here. The doubts piled on, stacking atop me. I was the plate and they were the pancakes. Nowhere to run when you’re drowning in sticky regret.
Maybe in times like those I wish I had a shoulder to lean on that wasn’t the chat bar of our Teams’ meetings. I wish the shoulder wasn’t the empty logs or the teacher egging more and more people to share a heart to at least have me recognized by three half-asleep classmates.
I felt like an editor more than a writer sometimes too. As though I was giving and giving and giving, always typing and absorbing and regurgitating for everyone’s sake. I never really felt like anyone tried to be the same way with me. I always made an effort for the sake of engagement, for the sake of the class. Silence in a classroom is quiet. Silence in a Teams’ meeting is deafening.
My first year was a wreck socially. I am hoping that this year, with much of my classes in-person, I can hopefully sit beside an extrovert that loves to talk and make friends so that I might drag a friend through.
This doesn’t mean I didn’t learn, however. I think my learning has grown like a knapweed ripping through tree bark. I feel like I can see the world differently. I feel like I can write both shamelessly and endlessly. The pain in my third finger on my right hand is non-existent when I am writing harder than the last thirty minutes of an exam.
My favourite part of this is the notebook. Notebooks weren’t something I extensively kept before this, preferring to keep my mind in messy sheets of paper either locked away in a binder or burned by a swirly paperclip. My sister suggested that I take up ancient arts of storage and sealing like how vampires used to conceal and move their palaces at a moment’s notice.
Notebooks are the essence of my learning. Watching a poem grown and bloom from draft to draft. Reading through book notes, through class notes, through my own personal blah blah of a chatterbox mind. Writing in the spaces. Writing outside of the margins. The erased bits. The bits of text scrubbed out and smudged and overwritten.
I’ve also learned to take notes from other people’s works. There has to be a reason why we’re reading their work. There has to be a reason why I love their work. I take notes on what I liked. Then I see how it can work with me and my own voice. The inspiration taking from another and writing like another are encouraged in creative writing classes.
I hope that going into the next year, I can make some friends and turn a good experience into a great one. The great demon hanging in the corner of my room will find the light one day and evaporate into the cold dust of a spiderweb. I hope I don’t feel worse than my lowest most pathetic days.
I wish everyone soon going back to school a great experience because I think we all need it after last year.
— Heleza
