Self-Celebrations: Writing
When I started grad school, I tried to keep my old poetry blog running. My graduate program was a dual-title Ph.D. one. The workload was insanely heavy. Hence, my schedule tended to go:
- 10:00am–10:00pm — school things
- 10:00pm–4:00am — poetry
- 4:00am–10:00am — sleep
- 10:00am — wake & repeat
I kept that up for months. I felt wrong for trying to be “artistic” when I was being intensively groomed for a career rooted in statistical analysis — and my university was paying for that to happen.
My “guilty pleasure,” creative writing, felt entirely at odds with my intended professional future. I knew that this kind of double-life and serious sleep deprivation were not sustainable.
But I loved writing. I’d realized in the months before grad school, in fact, that writing was what I really wanted to do.
My therapist was stunned at the schedule I was keeping, but she validated my need for so much writing time:
“I think the fact that you’re writing so much, honestly, is a big part of the reason why you’re handling the transition to grad school so well.”
Maybe she was right. But it couldn’t last. I basically gave up the poetry by the next semester. A photographer reached out to inquire…
