Waiting For Life to Catch Up (So I Can Write About it)

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Columbia Barnard chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

How do I convey a feeling I’ve never felt before? The answer is: I can’t. Until recently, I’ve been operating under the precedent that I must seek out the feelings that I wish to create with, feel them, and only then can I attempt to capture them through my writing.

It’s an odd thing to be so passionate about a calling that seems to depend on lived experiences, especially ones that I often find myself chasing after and never catching. No matter the form of writing, there always exists a personal archive of moments, feelings, relationships, etc. that inform how one creates. The idea that this rolodex of cumulative life experience also consists of a depth component, or an ability to feel these experiences to a certain level of fullness to write well, complicates creation even further. This assertion is one that has plagued me for as long as I’ve been serious about writing, most prominently since moving to New York and realizing just how “behind” I’ve felt in my life. 

I can’t just learn development by reading a book or even hearing someone else describe it; it’s physical, experiential. I want to get to the depths of my own expression and train it, to cut it up, contort it, and move with it. I think it’ll be easier to get to that point when I don’t consistently feel like I’ve only just learned to stand on my own two feet.

I recently had the thought that I’ve never experienced “the sweet stuff” when it comes to romance, scenically spread in a traditional progression throughout my life. There was no kindergarten boyfriend (K-12, if we’re being honest), no awkward first kiss that sparks fond and palpable memory, no hand holding for the sake of hand holding…none of it. It all just feels so wrongly anachronistic for a girl trying to write the next great American novel! Instead, the delivery of the romantic suitors I ordered were delayed and showed up to my doorstep in weird spurts that just got me more frustrated, only to not fit me at all and look nothing like their pictures online. Ba-dum-tss. 

Alright, that was me being harsh and retaliatorily scorned, but they’ve made me all the more realize that I still get excited about the possibility of having such a child-like and reverse-developmental scenario happen to me one day. This is a perfect illustration of my earlier point: I have been so afraid that I do not have enough experience to make good, deep art. And not writing experience, but life experience. If I can’t master the elementary facets of my life, how can I create something profound? Do those who can’t “do”…write about “doing”? I’m not even writing about “doing,” I’m barely writing about “wanting to do”! But, then again, there’s also a theory that if you put a chimpanzee in front of a typewriter with an infinite amount of time, it will eventually write Shakespeare…and there’s an entire mathematical equation for the likelihood of that happening. What is the probability that this human girl is able to write something good in the confines of a couple years? The ball has to get rolling.

But maybe that’s precisely it: I’ve spent more time hyperfixated on making great art than making art at all. This “deficit” in experience that I assign as a direct correlation to the quality of art I can make has blocked me from creating it all together. Instead, I’ve spent my time trying to shove my life into mismatched shapes, orchestrating experiences and encounters with others that aren’t natural to my timeline. I don’t want to suggest that I am disingenuous in relationships, but there’s always a thought in the back of my mind that I must accumulate and curate the experiences of my life as an internal reference for creating art. I find myself shaking off the idea that they’re something I’ve sought out just for the sheer fact of strengthening my craft. Sometimes I’ve felt like a siphon in the lives of others, picking their minutiae, instead of pulling from any sort of personal archive. But, I can’t osmotically absorb life experience from the people I admire or am envious of (or even those I desire), and I do not want to move through relationships and occurrences with the expectation that they must impact my creative growth. It’s got to be me.

Lately, I’ve been giving up and giving in. The answer still remains, I do not believe that you can fully convey or elicit the reactions of others when you don’t know a feeling; you just can’t know how to say it! In that same vein, though, I must trust myself to say something: to write what I know, what I feel to its fullest depths without being scared that it’ll come out childish or underdeveloped. Knowing more doesn’t mean knowing best, and I think that could also apply to feelings too. On the metric of fullness: my life has been fully mine. Why couldn’t that be enough to move someone?