On sustaining a creative life

Reading, writing, and listening to stories have been a part of my life for as long as I remember. As cliché as it sounds, literature is my first love. In my time at Scripps, I have devoted myself to exploring the possibilities and limitations of language. At the beginning of this semester, I made a decision to write a creative thesis. Since then, I’ve been working to integrate creative writing into my daily routines as fully as possible.

At Scripps, I have numerous obligations that pose barriers for maintaining a writing life. When there are papers due, emails to respond to, meetings/events to coordinate and attend, creative writing usually takes a back seat to more pressing demands. It is easy to let these obligations to serve as an excuse for not writing. It’s easy to put off writing until tomorrow. The draft of that story isn’t going anywhere.

Yet, I have come to realize that the Scripps environment is conducive to writing in so many ways. Here, I can take advantage of classes, events, and workshops among the wealth of resources available in Claremont. But more importantly, there are communities of writers at Scripps who are willing to share, compassionately critique, and motivate each other to produce great work.

At times, writing is incredibly difficult and giving up is too tempting. Maybe the protagonist is stagnant or meandering, maybe the plot is nonexistent, or the setting is all wrong for the characters’ state of mind. Pushing past that wall crushing the chapter that’s not going anywhere seems like an impossible task. I’ve tried to take concrete steps to write for an hour every day, even when inspiration doesn’t strike. Sometimes, going through the motions can lead to a breakthrough.

There will always be challenges to doing creative work, because creativity in our culture is seen as a luxury, and not a necessity. But as I write more often and more consistently, I begin to realize that writing, for me, is a form of self-care. I write because writing is a way for me to process my life. I write to give myself voice.

Outside of Scripps, there will be more challenges if I choose to work and leave this intimate residential community. But I know that I want to sustain a writing life. I’m thinking about pursuing a career in academia, and I would like to teach creative writing someday. Although that seems like a faraway dream, I am determined to nurture my creative outlets no matter what I choose to do after graduation.

How about you? What are your long term plans for sustaining a creative life?

Commitment, responsibility, and following the heart

This semester, I found myself doubting my value as a student, aspiring activist, and writer. I was constantly looking for that feeling that I seemed to have lost. Amidst the stress of senior year, the drive I felt for campus activism and creative writing seemed to have evaporated. Everything I used to love seemed diluted, flat, rendered into mere obligations to complete.

In whatever I do, I have always tried to follow my heart. When I fell in love with fiction and fantasy as a child, I decided that I wanted to be a writer. In college, I discovered the personal relevance of political activism in my life and became passionately involved in the Asian American Student Union and social justice issues. When I chose to become invested in these activities, I was following my heart. What I had chosen to pursue fulfilled me, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, in ways that transcended ordinary education or vocation.

So this year, when what I loved ceased to fulfill me completely, I began to turn away from activism and became more and more disengaged from my life. I missed meetings. I lost touch with friends. I missed meals and slept too late. I stopped writing for weeks and thought that I might never start again. And I felt crushed by this enormous sense of guilt, that I wasn’t living up to my own and others’ expectations of me. I didn’t know how to break out of my emotional stasis, of inaction. I yearned to be the better person in my mind, but I didn’t know how to reach that seemingly impossible ideal.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on responsibility and obligation in conjunction with following a passion. Of course, you must follow your heart and pursue what you love. However, maybe succumbing to every emotional impulse in the course of that pursuit isn’t always healthy. Perhaps it is best to let your heart determine a course of action at the beginning. Let the heart guide the direction of an arrow. But after the arrow takes flight, concentrate all of your energy for it to shoot off into the distance, as far as possible without falling.

A professor told me that if one positions oneself as an activist, one begins to accept the roles and responsibilities that activism demands. I am beginning to feel the impact and implications of that advice. Activism, writing, and any other life long pursuits, are not only passions, but also commitments. When I make a commitment to be an activist, it is not enough for me to only engage in activism when I am deeply inspired. Nor is it enough for me to passively accept my apathy and await forces of inspiration to lift me from my disengagement. Commitment is a choice. Choosing to accept responsibilities and do the work even when I feel uninspired is perhaps the greatest and most difficult act for me to make use of my life. I am willing to make that commitment.

My Personality Test Obsession (and how self reflection can define career goals)

My friends know me for my obsession with the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, a personality test that attempts to categorize people’s traits into four different functions that describe them. I took the test in high school and read the online descriptions for my “type,” INFP. I know that I should be critical of the idea that people can be compartmentalized into sixteen types, but I was drawn in by the eerily accurate summaries of my strengths, weaknesses, dreams, and fears.

So, I was sucked in. I started reading more about Myers Briggs, personality psychology, forums, web articles. I flipped through books at the library. I made my friends take the MBTI and started analyzing people I met in my head, trying to figure out if they were more “thinking” or “feeling,” “sensing” or “intuitive.” (Thank you, friends, for humoring me.)

You don’t have to be as obsessed as me to use the MBTI as a tool to self-reflect on how you perceive the world. But, the MBTI (read with an open mind and critical eye) can be extremely useful for understanding your personal relationships and career aspirations. For example, as an INFP (Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving), I know that my strengths lie in my strong values and ideals, insatiable love for profundity and philosophical musings, and compassion. I know that my idealism fuels my commitment to social justice and activism. I relish introspection, whether it’s through reading, writing, or bonding with close friends. I know that at times I have trouble overcoming my extreme dislike of conflict to assert my opinions. I become easily overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy or discouragement from personal failings or criticism.

I want to find the career path that will be the most personally fulfilling. For me, fulfillment is inseparable from the possibility of achieving my ideals of living in a world that is just for all. Continue reading

Loving the Questions

I wonder if the reason that I haven’t been getting the dreaded question, “What are you doing next year?” is because I’ve resorted to a comfortable hermitage, surrounding myself with thesis and friends who share my confusion. But warding off the questions successfully doesn’t necessarily mean that the stress of senior year can be kept at bay. With so much uncertainty on the horizon, it’s hard to escape the fog of panic that occasionally engulfs all of us to-be-graduating Scripps students.

As I walk across Bowling Green Lawn, I sometimes imagine each senior walking purposefully with a bubble bursting with questions hovering over their heads. Where is my thesis going? Where will I live? What kind of work will I do? Graduate school or job? How will I pay my loans? What if my parents need my help at home? And sometimes the mundane turns existential—what is the larger purpose of all this work?

Sometimes when I’m in the middle of multiple forces pulling me in different directions, it’s easy to forget that others are going through similar moments of crisis. Especially when others seem to project “confidence, courage, and hope,” I wonder why I am the anomaly among these inspiring women. These days, it’s easy for me to feel unmoored. I believed that I had carved a path through the chaos of endless options by embracing politics, activism, art, and writing in a way that made sense to me. Now, I find myself wondering about the hazards of pursuing too much and never gaining an expertise in one area. I pause on the questions that multiply at alarming rates, overpowering the answers.

When I get stuck in worrying about the questions, I often think of one of my favorite quotes by poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Learning to love the questions themselves is a difficult task, especially when we live in a world that is focused on products and answers. Our society drives us to competition and self-doubt. But when we constantly doubt our accomplishments and compare ourselves to others, we lose sight of our daily successes—finishing that paper for Victorian literature, leading a successful club meeting, conversing in Spanish for the first time at the lunch table. More importantly, we lose our ability to see that with our seemingly insignificant daily choices to love ourselves and support our friends, we are “living into the answers.”

I want to end this post with a beautiful lesson from “Life After Scripps” week, elegantly summed up in one image—success as the twisted arrow that curves in many chaotic directions before it shoots into infinity. The future is too complicated to be mapped as linear trajectories, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t find answers in the curves and digressions.

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Confronting the Senior Thesis

If you’re a Scripps senior like me, the time has come for you to meet the Senior Thesis. At first, the Thesis is an aloof and mysterious creature. You can outline its nebulous shape through a fog of all the classes you’ve taken in your major and all the ideas that have inspired you. It lurks in the shadows, hiding behind the overwhelming piles of reading for other classes and fellowship/graduate school applications.

I am still in the preliminary stages of getting to know my senior thesis, and I find myself often caught between excitement and panic. So many ideas and communities have inspired me over the past three years. How can I possibly sift through them all to construct a project that will incorporate all my passions? This isn’t just any project, I thought; thesis is a culmination of my college career that must be original, worthwhile, and representative of all the moments of intellectual brilliance and personal transformation that Scripps fosters.

Then I realized that some of those standards are perhaps a little unrealistic. Continue reading