From middleburycampus.com
By Christy Liang
“You are a writer. Don’t tell your parents that.” My English advisor, Professor Robert Cohen, told me these words as I sat in his office, talking about my recent turn towards Buddhist thought and how I’ve unclouded my judgment of the outside world over the summer.
Before college, I knew with an unshakable certainty that I wanted to be a writer. I’d browse through all the creative writing classes and imagine myself in them, enthralled and radiant with enthusiasm. All I wanted to do was turn my wayward feelings and swirling thoughts into words, to press permanence on what is bound to pass. Writing — both personal essays and short stories — always brought me immense joy and helped me establish in clearer, richer terms who I am and who I’d like to be.
After a couple of lukewarm creative writing workshops at college, however, I found myself drifting away from the idea of writing as a career, or rather, writing as something that can be taught in an academic setting. Words have always come to me from deeply intimate corners of my selfhood, on their own accord or prompted by my overpowering disposition of inward searching. I love the way sentences unfurl like a stream from an unnameable, yet visceral center within me. In brief moments, as I write, the interior and the exterior coalescence. It is quite magical. I feel imbued with an aliveness akin to the feeling of a really good conversation, a long, meditative walk or running through the woods as the sun’s about to set.
Then I realized that writing is a deeply personal act to me. That it matters the most when I feel compelled to write, not towards an audience or to fulfil an academic task, but because my innate striving for meaning distilled from lived experience brings me back to the page, again and again. As a result, I thought I’d start journaling.
In late August, I stumbled upon Tao Lin’s My College Diary published in The Paris Review and had an absolute blast reading it. I found it so real, unfiltered, full of laughs and the poignancy of growing up. It captured the chaotic yet ultimately aestheticized tenor of college life so well that I immediately thought of doing something similar.
For the longest time, I was sceptical about keeping a diary. I thought I’d feel stifled by the banality of writing down what happened, what I ate, or whom I talked to. But Tao Lin showed me something different, that a diary tracks the psychological undertones of your ever-shifting existence, that it could be terribly refreshing to look back on an entry a month, a year, or even a decade ago and think: “Wow that’s how I was feeling.” I also thought about how these documentations of day-to-day happenings, moods and reflections may inspire future creative projects.
So, I started journaling and keeping a digital diary simultaneously. I’ve found it to be a deeply centring and affirming act, one that reminds me I can always take root in my interiority, which is, in fact, infinite. To my pleasant surprise, I’ve also found that in these highly personal mediums, my language acquires a special lightness. Unburdened by academic jargon and any intention to impress, I write almost lyrically, with phrases running around like little rabbits on the field. The line between prose and poem often gets straddled; past, present and future converse with one another. Most importantly, what induces fear, anxiety, or sadness becomes invariably tamed after getting channelled out.
Nothing lasts, after all. We’re just taking a seat in a theatre, watching as experiences happen to us.
A couple nights ago, I wrote in my journal: “I feel like a thing, a lovely, shifting thing held all around by a porous membrane, floating soundlessly through the theatre of life filled with giggles, sparks of insight, and love ripening through avenues imaginable and beyond.”
May we all be seen and held by something larger, something gentle, something deeply within.
https://www.middleburycampus.com/article/2025/09/my-college-diary
No comments:
Post a Comment