I am writing this as our first week after hybrid comes to an end. To say this week was stressful is an understatement, and I don’t think I realized, until this week, how many hats I actually wear: student body president, RISE editor-in-chief, writer, student, daughter, sister, friend, cat mom. I do sometimes get overwhelmed and feel myself being spread thin. I know that I cannot give my all in everything and that it’s okay to say no and to give up control, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t still struggle with it. This week, my writing suffered. Sure, I had some very successful SGA meetings, launched a digital newspaper, planned some school events, did my school work, applied to college, hung with friends, and still managed to sleep, but at what cost?
I submitted a short story last week that was quite possibly the worst thing I have ever written. I have never been more ashamed of anything I’ve turned in. My friends tried to encourage me, but I know that it wasn’t my best work, and I feel like I let, not only, myself but my writing community down, and that is my biggest disappointment.
This week, we were challenged to just be poets and writers and create poetry, but I have to admit, it was one of the hardest assignments for me. We were simply told to write poetry, and I had to force myself to produce content. Writing has never been this hard for me, and I can’t deal. I feel like I am losing apart of my identity.
And if I’m not a writer, who am I?
During quarantine, I didn’t write. I wrote a single poem during the entire 6-month break. I blamed it on lack of inspiration, but with what’s going on in the world, there’s no way it was that. I think I just didn’t want to admit to myself that writing had stopped being fun. The thing that I used to love most had become a chore. I stared at blank document after blank document, watching the bar blink at me. It’s all I could do.
But, here I am, stuck in this funk, wondering when it will end. When will the joy return? When will the words stop being something I loathe?
When will the writer in me start writing again?
This was pretty candid and personal, and I normally write things like this in my journal, but I felt the need to share in case any others seem to have lost their writer’s voices too.
Maleigh, this is beautifully written and incredily relatable. As students of MSA, we’ve transitioned from creating for fun and out of passion too simply for a grade. As other things take over (family, extracurriculars, our social lives, etc.), our art gets pushed to the back burner and begins to seem more like a chore. I don’t know how to combat this, but I want you to know that you’re not alone in how your feeling. I hope that you get your groove back because you’re an extraordinary writer! Take care of yourself <3
I definitely understand how you feel. Sometimes I have such a hard time finding joy in writing. I wonder when it will ever be fun again. It just seems like a chore sometimes. I didn’t write a lot over the pandemic, and I regret it.