For the English Grads on Commencement Day

I had gotten so comfortable in that desk, swaddled in my cozy nest of mistakes, that I had forgotten why I paid all that money for the privilege of attending a university.

 The first time I looked back at those six years, it really did appear that I'd made a grave error in choosing a BA in Creative Writing.  That was two months after I graduated. As I re-read my fiction portfolios while drunk on a particularly hopeless night, I wondered what the hell I'd actually learned. The things I'd written there were shit, but they gave me a degree anyway.  Had I become a better writer? Did I come any closer to saying what I had to say? Did I actually have anything to say, or was I just hungover the whole time? 

How dare them, I thought. How could they throw me out into a world I'm not ready for? They should have told me I was wrong; that I'm not actually a writer; that my 22 grand would've been much better spent at a trade school. It took me six years to figure out that I wanted an English degree at all, and it happened as I was walking across the stage at the PMAC. I concluded, then, that I may as well have spent six years banging my head against some bricks -- that's what 500 hangovers feel like.

I had learned everything but what I needed to know: it failed to explain exactly how much $22,000 is, or that my years there would cost so much, excluding all the bar tabs. It didn't warn me that most of my friends would move away after graduation, or that I would have to re-evaluate myself, my ambitions, and what I always said I'd do once I had a piece of paper that said I could write. I had big dreams! I wanted to travel the world and revolutionize the print industry, write bestsellers with little effort, and give commencement speeches and whatnot. Instead, months went by, and I was still refilling iced tea and serving dressing on the side; scanning Craigslist scams and hoping for the best. I'd go to bed homesick -- not for my family, but for my alma mater, and the golden age of postponed decisions it represented. My writerly dream at LSU had been driven by being forced to wake up at 9 a.m., to trudge my dehydrated ass to class, where I could drink overpriced coffee and wonder what I did last night.  

I was not a writer, and I had the degree to prove it.

The months wore on, and I managed to kick myself out of my own pity kegger -- at least enough to make a list of things I was good at. My skills were as follows: I can manage money, I can chain smoke, I can bullshit a paper that could fool my Harvard-taught, Medieval specialist Chaucer professor. I can hit an occasional deadline, I can sort of speak German, and I can play solitaire for an entire day -- maybe longer.

As this didn't make me feel any more qualified, I started a list of things I wasn't willing to do with my life.

My list was as follows: I'm not willing to sit in a cubicle, watch the clock, or do algebra. My posture will never be scrutinized by anyone other than myself. I will never work nine to five, and there will never be early nights or mornings. I'm not willing to work a job that doesn't engage me intellectually on some level, because  I have no method of making myself care about boring shit. I'm not willing to exchange my freedom for a career that earns more than I need, because that's what souls do a few years before they die or have kids.

If I have any advice for new Creative Writing graduates, it is this: skip the list of things you're good at, and go straight for the list of things you're not willing to do with your life. Take your degree and scratch out "writing," because you're not qualified for that yet. Your degree is in Creative Living.

Looking for writing jobs based on a list of things I was good at felt a lot like writing a villanelle. By that, I mean it's like trying to fit a world of possibilities into an illogical, useless, and extremely difficult format that rarely looks or sounds right, even after centuries of editing. And when done correctly, it only impresses the pretentious fucks who move to Austin after college because "Louisiana is just not inspiring." [Note: save your fiery words about these people for next year, when they move back to their parents' house in the garden district. Those words age like a good cabernet.]

Nearly three years later, I still refer to the first draft of what I now refer to as my "Dignity List."

My first instinct was to blame someone, but there's no one to blame. All aside, this is what I was given. I graduated college in the middle of a peculiar economic collapse; in a land where waiting tables pulls in too much money to qualify for food stamps. I was educated, uninsured, and seriously in debt; but I was not special -- not by a long shot. A few years after I left the safety of Allen Hall, I came to the conclusion that no one was going to give me money to spend 10 years writing a masterpiece, a la Milton, and it was highly unlikely that I'd ever pay any bills by getting published in niche-driven literary magazines. I didn't want to be a teacher because my posture sucks and I feared creating a generation of cursing, slouching, lazy brats. And you know, without all that pressure I'd put on myself to be a great writer, it became clear that my useless degree was actually the best choice I'd ever made.

The piece of paper is a metaphor for itself: it's flimsy enough for me to bend it into whatever shape I want, and the words printed on it make no mention of a career. It says that I didn't spend 22 large investing in a job, which is good, because I get tired of shit really fast. It says I spent six years learning how to manage my money, my words, and my alcohol, which are the only three things a writer needs to manage. It says I can enjoy selling minivans to soccer moms during the day because it means I can use the shit they say as dialogue at some point. It says I will never have a bedtime, because staying up all night editing three sentences is a pleasure I'm not willing to give up, no matter what I have to do the next day.

It will always be worth it -- worth more than my job or my comfort zone or my stability -- because I didn't make the mistake of going to college for a career. I went to college so I could build the life I wanted, the one my parents told me was impossible: the colorful, sad, excited, difficult, manic, interesting, sleep-deprived playground of a life without a tether. An existence that isn't dictated by employment, because I refuse to live in that soulless limbo. When I show up for a job, it isn't because I'm trapped -- it's because I have to eat. I pay rent because I need a place to put the chair and the desk. I pay taxes and tickets because I don't think jail would fit in with my plan, and I've already decided I'm not going to the slammer for anything unoriginal.

It is not a life of glamour or comfort, and it is not as easy as it was to write an essay about it. There are late and lost bills, frequent pawn shop visits, and jars of cheap peanut butter. There are times when I have to choose between a single grocery item and a bag of cat food. There are fits and panics and shut-off faucets, and I'm as afraid of checking my bank account as most people are of cancer.

My first introduction to freelance journalism was a forwarded email from my cousin, who works as the web designer for The Advocate. The newsroom manager wrote, "Tell her we don't have 'jobs' -- we have 'opportunities.' Oh dear, she'll hear that a lot in her life." The tone of her words caught me off guard, but nearly three years later, I understand the exhaustion. 

Since then, I have written love letters for rich assholes on Match.com, worked catering gigs with my dad, sold bullshit fluff pieces to shitty publications, shredded paper for eight hours at a time, painted office walls, created a tiny business selling old textbooks on Amazon, and written a screenplay for a law firm's centennial celebration. I have transcribed interviews between refilling iced tea; I have walked to an interview after running out of gas nearby, and later caught a ride to the office to hit my deadline. At rock bottom, I found myself in the middle of a Word document filled with ways to make your Valentine feel special. 

I learned what makes a writer last year, about an hour after my heart careened off a metaphorical S-curve in the Andes, strapped to the hood of a flaming simile full of explosives, when I wrote and submitted a charming 900-word piece about the history of National Sandwich Day.

With as much passion as I've ever hated or loved anything and the urgency of involuntary bodily functions,  I carved some of the best sentences I've ever written.  Despite internal implosion. Despite having been awake for 38 hours; despite all the overdue bills; despite my friend from out of town, sleeping on the couch across the room.  Priority Number One: National Sandwich Day.

I lost myself in National Sandwich Day just as deeply as I'd ever lost myself writing poetry in the bathroom  at age 12, when I thought of writing as a compulsion instead of an art form: a selfish, indulgent, and violently private act, which required no reason from me, nor validation from anyone. When I finished, I sat there and basked in the glow of my awesome sentences, not giving a flying fuck about the absurdity of the topic. My heart had just been killed in a war zone, and I needed desperately to know that  I could still lose myself in writing -- that there was still a self to lose.

Earning a Creative Writing degree is like chemotherapy, aimed at the pretentious asshole who inevitably germinates when a young writer meets the necessary dead authors. But it's a persistent pestilence, and sometimes the chemo only kills the 12-year-old. Few 12-year-olds get out of college alive, and their bodies must go somewhere. That was the source of the weight I felt after college, and the reason I had to fill thousands of pages with boredom and bullshit before I could teach myself how to write again: At some point, I had become a pallbearer instead of a writer. 

 

Real Creative Writing requires at least two years of post-collegiate purgatory, as you must atone for believing that your degree makes you a writer. Being a writer after college only happens after the surgical removal of acquired pride; after careful memory excavation; after you're able to honor the start of your timeline by piecing together what sent you here. The Ground Zero; the moment you forgot what color the room was because you weren't actually in that room after you put the pen to paper; the depth and significance of what it felt like to write for no reason at all.

At 25, I locked eyes on my 12-year-old self; she was dirty with passion and hormones and words she didn't understand, trying over and over again to organize a feeling that I'm only beginning to find words for. I asked her if we really had something valid to say to the world. Are we writers? Or are we just pretentious, self-absorbed degree-holders, waiting for the world to realize and pay us for our God-given way with words?

With all her inexperience and without my writing degree, she didn't have much to say, of course. She was too busy writing to hear me.