Writing for the Sake of It
notes on my first semester
9/8 - Much has occurred and I’m still catching up. I am waiting for the routine to sink in and for the fear to cease. I’m doing well about embracing it though. I don’t know where I was during the summer but it wasn’t in reality. The suburbs pacify me and now nothing makes sense. Things are zooming out; I don’t like what I see.
Historically, I am bad at keeping a journal. In middle school, I became fascinated with bullet journal Youtubers. I watched hours of videos of attractive women in their twenties aesthetically organizing their lives. They were independent, autonomous, and beautiful. I was twelve years old and suffering the ailments of, well, being twelve years old. I tried it, the whole bullet journalling thing, even though I’ve never had a true inclination for visual art. I abandoned it soon after. I would later try again to no avail. I also tried keeping a normal, regular journal — but felt guilty whenever I abandoned it. When I attempted to write again, too much time elapsed between entries. I was met with the words of a stranger. The only bouts of consistent, daily journaling occurred in my final three years at summer camp out of a need for preservation. The time was finite and magical and terrible. I wrote in the evening, illuminated by string lights, listening to Mazzy Star. I occupied two pages, one if I was tired, to detail my day. I stopped when I got home; I didn’t need to narrativize the rest of summer. At the start of my junior and senior years of high school, I bought a brand new journal with the goal of documentation. Of course, they too were mostly abandoned.
All this to say: I am journaling regularly and without the rules that I used to impose. It sounds blatantly obvious: journaling doesn’t have to conform to specific structures. I know this, cognitively. (I know a lot of things cognitively). I can draw a cheap metaphor for starting college but I don’t feel like it.
8/28 - It’s my third day at BU and I’m already thinking in past tense. I’m reading “The Idiot” and it's comforting to inhabit the mind of an eighteen-year-old college student living in Boston who writes and isn’t quite a person yet. I’m thinking about that tweet that said how buying books is like buying wine: you save it for when the time is right. I’m glad I’m reading this now. I can’t wait to get smarter. Maybe I’m doomed to be a writer like Selin? I don’t think so — I don’t know much of anything yet. I guess I’ve felt very secure during the last month or so, during summer really, and I’ve forgotten what it feels like to walk on uneven ground.
9/11 - Nothing makes sense — I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing here. I can’t regulate my temperature and my head feels like it's been carved out. I am invisible and I don't mind but I miss feeling overwhelmed by clarity. Maybe this is good for me; maybe this is what I needed. Images are breaking apart and resituating themselves. I might buy some Pedialyte. Maybe that will fix me. I want to feel whole again.
I am trying to balance ego and confidence. I know that I am talented and a hard worker with a reverence for my work. I also know that I can be egotistical and insecure. But, shouldn’t I revel in it? After all, society conditions women to be overly humble while men are allowed to be proud. I’ve heard that rhetoric my entire life and figured that I would never succumb to such anti-feminist self-doubt. Okay so, am I a #BossWoman or am I a pretentious cunt? Can’t a girl contain multitudes? If I’m not superior to others then am I even talented?
9/21 - I am leading the field at observing others. Everyone and everything is incredibly distinctive if not in their own right then in how they are placed. I know who everyone is — I know how they are. And me as well. I am nothing but an amalgamation of traits forming character.
I am having strange dreams that feel more emotionally profound than some moments I have when awake. I know that I am longing for something, that I am in the pursuit of something, that I desire something. Then again, I always desire. I only know myself thrashing in desire’s grasp. I don’t know what I want and I hope it isn’t what I think it is. I loathe predictability; I am addicted to making things interesting.
I loved Rayne Fisher-Quann’s recent essay. I immediately sent it to my best friends and also somehow found a way to bring it up during class. I keep thinking about this quote: “the attempt to describe the unbearable, knowing that we will fail but hoping to fail with dignity or beauty, is not only the engine of all art but, perhaps, the engine of humanity.” I love it when someone smarter than me figures it all out.
Other Favorites of the Semester:
Book: In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado
Movie: Showgirls
TV: Succession (Honorable mention to Drag Race All Stars 2)
Song: Forward to the Kill, Sydney Ross Mitchell
Theatre: BU’s production of Julius Caesar. There was a sequence at the beginning of the play that was, no exaggeration, the coolest thing I’ve ever seen on stage. It made me very happy to be here.
10/15 - I’m trying to practice looking until I see. I think, for a very long time, I occupied my mind so violently because I didn’t like what I saw otherwise.
It’s late and I’m feeling destructive. It’s early and I’m feeling wretched. I sip from a weeks-old bottle of lukewarm Diet Pepsi, enjoying how it coats my teeth and warms my stomach. I think to myself, could I be a poet if someday I understood? And then, I think, would I want to? I still don’t know what I want but I know what I need. I need a copious amount of patterned tights and for cigarettes to not make me nauseous anymore. I need to write disgusting words that evoke something serious. I need a body to press into. I need to act a script that makes me jealous and I need to reach the precipice of fight or fuck with someone who I want to, well, fight or fuck. Metaphorically, of course. I would never need literally.
I want nothing. I need nothing. I am waiting to be filled.
A good friend and I agreed that twenty-years-olds fuck eighteen-year-olds as a return to form of sorts — fucking nostalgia. I relayed this analysis to my best friends from home and they disagreed. I believe our analysis is true, but then again, I am addicted to making things interesting.
10/22 - I understand why people love fall. At home, it always beckoned the start of suburban winter hell. Of course, I don’t know what Boston winters are like. Right now is beautiful — that is what really matters. I’ll just have to keep finding the beauty as it decays. I feel very lucky. I feel like I understand. Or, rather, understand how I can’t and why. Everything I am learning points to the same conclusions:
Descartes is wrong. “I think therefore I am” NO! You are a physical, pulsating being. Therefore I am and therefore you are.
Experience, not interpretation.
There is more, I don’t know shit yet. Revel in it.
Life is about finding new people to love.
My first semester in acting school has me thinking things like “why art” and “art is the most important thing in the world” and “comedy rule of threes” and “subverting form” (and being clever). So, essentially, being very annoying. I think I’m doing it right though — the whole art school thing. I worked very hard to be this annoying.
I’ve been worrying that I’m a better writer than actor. I relayed this fear to one of my professors and she said, “Well, can’t you be both?” Well, of course, I responded. Still, for some reason I can’t stop thinking about it: what if I am a better writer than actor? Then what? Am I wasting my degree? Will I continue training, haunted by the knowledge that I will never be as good of an actor as I could be a writer? Okay okay. I stopped taking my meds because I can’t orgasm on them and I’ve been feeling dangerously sexually frustrated. Also, my vibrator keeps dying in a way that's frankly, comical. I should probably take my meds. Maybe I’ll stop worrying so much. Maybe I'll also stop feeling so nauseous all of the time. Is it better to cum or to not feel debilitatingly anxious? Don’t answer. I was being facetious. I’ve decided that it is okay to write about masturbation because my favorite writers are very weird with it and I should practice what I preach. I’m not going to repeat the I-am-addicted-to-making-things-interesting motif, but I guess I just did.
Maybe I’m the type of actor who is also a writer and approaches the craft of acting from that perspective. Maybe I’m very annoying. I’m trying to find the root of this artistic crisis, part of which is that I am having an artistic crisis in the first place, which is very different from other crises I’ve had prior like: feeling-like-I’m-dying, feeling-like-I-need-to-die, and wanting-to-be-thinner.
12/7 - I want to be entertained. I want to be important and do important things. Or, interesting things. I am interesting and I want to be doing very interesting things so I have interesting things to think and write about. I want a latex collar and to go to parties where people offer me hard drugs. Mostly, I would like to be trusted enough by cool people so that they would offer me hard drugs and I would say, oh, no thanks, I’m okay.
In my end-of-semester conferences, the same professor told me to think about what, artistically, brought me the most pleasure. Was it acting? Was it writing? Was it some unknown and unexplored other option? She also said not to think about it too much right now. It was more so a question for later. I sat on the couch across from her, my legs crossed, and took a sip of my 200 mg energy drink branded for women. I swallowed. Right, okay, I said.
I’m working to not think about existential questions of life because some things aren’t my business yet. I’ve been thinking about my professor’s word choice, though. “Pleasure.” It’s been used a lot this semester, by all of my professors: find pleasure in movement, pleasure in practice, pleasure in tedium, pleasure in the play.
I might just be at a stage where I think everything is sex (except sex, which is power) but, are we talking about sex here?
11/16 - There is something in the erotics of conversation—the tension of competition, a challenge of power dynamics—that really tugs at something inside of me.
I forgot that spectating is fundamentally different than creating.
After one of my ritualistic final assignments, I expressed frustration at my lack of catharsis. My professor looked me in the eyes and said, “You know those artists who are never satisfied with their work?”
She meant it as a compliment. She referenced Martha Graham's philosophy of artistic divine dissatisfaction, “a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” Who am I to argue with Martha Graham?
I think, maybe, “divine dissatisfaction” might be what makes me a good actor. But, other actors, great actors, don’t experience it. Divine dissatisfaction isn’t universal to the artistic experience. So, what, am I the lucky one who drew the tortured-artist short stick?
There’s something in the experience of acting that I can’t seem to pin down. I don't want to sound trite so I’m not going to call it magic. But, could it be? At least, in the way magic is used to identify experiences. We call things magical all of the time. Was dinner, really, truly magic? Was last night really, truly beautiful? Does it matter? The word is said, or written, and then it becomes so.
I have the authority; I write the words.
I think I may have an I-have-to-work-harder-than-others-to-achieve-similar-goals complex. I think I should go back to therapy. I think I should stop going off my meds cold turkey when I feel like it. I think I should stop hitting my cart like a damn vape. I think I should stop being so confessional in front of people who won’t give me anything valuable in return.
I’ve been up since four and my stomach hurts.
11/3 - It is November again and the fantasy is fading away into the mist. Like clockwork, the end of fall marks a death. It always does. What I grew may now die. Its decomposition will birth anew; you just have to wait for it.
as a junior going to acting university in boston, oh my god this brought me back to my first semester! you really captured that feeling of constant change, grappling with your talents, becoming who you are. keep writing!!