#tamucw

November is usually a ridiculously productive month for me as a writer. I participate in NaNoWriMo more often than not, and even in the years I’m not Nanoing though, I find myself writing more. The new chill in the air keeps me inside on my laptop, and the constant updates from friends writing their 50,000 words keep me motivated.

This year, things were different. The depression that I generally cope so well with started to take on new shapes, the exhausting apathy sneaking in through the cracks. By the first of November, I had stopped writing completely. 

It’s not like I filled up my days with anything else. Those thirty minute intervals I’ve carved out in my day are still there, and now they drag out into hours of staring at blank word documents.

The worst part? I have no idea how to talk about it.

This year I’ve concentrated so hard on “legitimizing” myself as a writer. I’ve involved myself in physical and online communities, I’ve made connections, I’ve started a ‘brand’. Admitting that I was too depressed to actually write doesn’t really seem to factor into that brand.

My apathy also started to get very specific. I’ve written multiple blog posts over the past month, including a few that I think are some of my best. I still tweet and retweet, even posting excerpts from my drafts and pictures of the marked up pages I was editing. I couldn’t write a single story though. Class deadlines passed me by without so much as an e-mail to the professor about my situation. I started dodging thesis meetings and craft workshops. 

My heart isn’t in it.

Where’d it go?

I’m still doing research, still going to readings and asking questions. Everything looks right. But I can’t write? The only thing that brings real purpose to my days; the thing I do to escape the rest of my life. And now, it has escaped me.

As writers, I think we face this more often than any of us care to admit. The myth of “writers block” helps keep us from thinking too much about it. We ignore the fact that we are, indeed, burning out. All the books, all the scholars, everything I know says that I should just sit down and write. “A paragraph a day will get you a novel”. 

What about when you just can’t, though? 

How do you find the tenderness to allow yourself to stop writing, collect yourself, and begin again on your own terms. How do you love writing, when you don’t feel like your heart can love anything.

I’m not sure yet, but I’m ready to begin trying.

I’m ready to talk.

I know I’ve spent a lot of time this semester waxing poetic about graduation.

Bear with me, I’m about to do it once more. I think you’ll like it though.

My perspective has shifted a lot since I started school at Texas A&M.

I still remember the first time I set foot in the Liberal Arts and Humanities building, eyes wide and ready to take in this mysterious “LAAH” that all the tour guides had been mentioning. 

Dr Vasilakis was walking next to Jaclyn Brown, leading a gaggle of transfer students across campus in weather that was approaching a hurricane. Later, when I was filling out paperwork in Rudder Tower, there was a tornado warning and we all had to pile into the auditorium, listening to howling winds circling the campus.

I liked the LAAH more than any other building on campus, just because of the windows. Floor to ceiling windows on every floor, giving you a chunk of College Station, framed by the long green lawn out front. 

I couldn’t stop looking outside. I loved the giant, square cement buildings, always reminding me of the book on brutalist architecture that I read in High School. The sweet antiquity of the Administrative building should look fragile next to such buildings, but instead it looks even tougher for the association.

Now, I find myself looking inwards. I still love the windows, but I love the shine of the floor even more. In the mornings, after the cleaning crews have done their tasks and the students have yet to destroy the floor, you can even see the reflections of clouds in the speckled tile. 

When I realized the other day, that I have gone from looking at the world, to looking at it’s reflection, I laughed. How poetic is that? How perfectly does it relate to my college transition?

I came to this University full of ideas. I wanted to change the world. I had been staring out of windows all my life, and I was finally ready to make an impact! In the two years I have made this campus my home, the world has changed me more than I ever could have expected. My perspective has shifted so radically, I’m not sure if I’m the same person on some days.

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I gave K 

a ride home 

on Wednesday 

after study group

“what is this junk?”

she asked me.

I sat with A 

in the parking lot 

in the rain

and she said

“man, I vibe with all 

this stuff.”

At the inspection 

station the

woman testing 

my brakes

says “Ooh, 

that’s cool.”

Her boss asks if

I can see 

the road through 

my “piles of 

trash,

and shit.”

I love all the random crap I have piled up in my Jeep, and I don’t really care what you think!

I save pretty sticks and stones, dried flowers and leaves, strings of beads and light-up necklaces that I grab from parades. Every tiny thing in this car has a story that I remember, whether it brings back laughter or tears. Even the mud splatter on the window, or the drawings in the dust. It’s all there for a reason, I promise. None of it’s trash.

"That’s all gone, gone with the wind.”

My favorite graffito is the one scribbled in the margin.

A reader, leaving themselves breadcrumbs.

“Look here, I’m important”

Yes. Yes you are.

I always check out the oldest book in the library collection, hoping for a scribbled map through the plot and an inked arrow guiding me to the brightest stars.

“That’s all gone, gone with the wind.”

An unlit neon sign zaps to life. 

One I wasn’t looking for. 

I never look for Mitchell, though.

My eyes are scanning for Fitzgerald,

sometimes Hemingway.

But now, with the first torch lit,

I can see the path to the grail.

Thanks, black ballpoint.

Just a dog picture.

Seems pretty basic, I know. But there’s so much more to the story.

Baileyi is scared of everything. We picked him out at the shelter because he was the only dog not barking. Instead, he sat right up against his gate, licking my hand through the bars.

“Yeah, this is my boy,” I remember saying to Jack. 

I didn’t need to say it though, he didn’t even bother replying. We had both started smiling, knowing that he was ours as soon as we saw him.

When we walked out of the shelter in Hearne, Texas, we started walking down the main street. We hadn’t gotten a hundred feet when the first semi-truck whizzed by us, it’s load rattling precariously. Baileyi froze. For the hour that we walked him on that first day, we stood still more than we walked. Letting him listen to the traffic and back up into our legs when big trucks came by. He was scared of everything.

I don’t know why such a big dog is so scared. I don’t know where he came from, but there’s only so many reasons for a dog like him to exist. He’s built to fight.

American Bully, Pit Bull, Great Dane, Doberman.

None of his breeds are particularly snuggly.

But he’s still scared of everything. 85 pounds of straight muscle, big enough to bowl me over when he bumps into me, and yet he hides when I turn the shower on.

This picture was taken the day after we picked him up. I woke up that first morning to his nose on my cheek, belly up as he was happily sandwiched between me and Jack. When we walked him to the park, he was terrified of the log we usually sit on. Jack had to physically pick him up and set him on top of it, holding him in place so he could balance. The pictures I took of that moment are all impressively majestic, but I honestly don’t care about them. This is my favorite snapshot from that day.

Because when I shouted “C’mon boy!”, there was no hesitation. No fear. He just jumped towards me, trusting me.

85 pounds of timid, baby Bully that can’t stand on the sidewalk while a truck rolls by, but will jump off a big spooky log when Mama calls him.

                                                                                                                            “The eagle is symbolic of agility and power, and ability to reach great heights.” 

( The above was reprinted on page 1 of the November 1977 issue of The Texas Aggie from the October 1969 issue of the same publication. )

I didn’t expect this bird to be so heavy.

Only five or six grams, but it feels like a fifty pound anchor holding me in place. To Texas, to Aggieland, to the Liberal Arts and Humanities Building, to this present iteration of my reality.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to that reality once I leave it.

This eagle is meant to symbolize our ability to reach great heights, so why does it feel like the fifth floor of the LAAH is high enough? 

I feel like Gatsby.

Standing at the end of my dock, reaching for the green light that is graduation. What will happen when they hand me that diploma? Will I realize everything I was reaching for was an empty dream? Will I end up back in my grand empty home, waiting on a call that I will die before getting?

My sensibilities as an English major tell me no. They tell me this is a grandiose writing style and Fitzgerald was writing in a drunken, pessimistic mania. Those same sensibilities also tell me that this story, my story, is concluding it’s introduction. The main players have been introduced, the theme has been established, and we’re ready to ramp up the action. I’m ready to see what this story builds up to. I’m ready to see how my legacy is written.

Some dreams aren’t empty. Some stories are worth living.

Fighting Texas class of 2018

I like reading the

personals

on craigslist

because it feels so

sweet

to see the 

intimate 

side of

someone

else who isn’t

looking