A different stage with writing

And yes, English has always been my favorite subject. I was decent at others — good at math, mediocre at science, tolerant of history — but English, for the longest time, was easy the way breathing was. I know how pretentious this all sounds, and I’m aware my experience with my passion for writing follows the typical “initial spike, then burnout” pipeline familiar to any other passionate person.

But even recognizing the universality of this event, for the last two years, I just haven’t been able to get over what feels like such a loss.

Like most passions, writing was so inherently personal to me. Especially as someone who primarily wrote creative nonfiction, specifically personal essays and memoirs, every line demanded an even deeper dig into my thoughts. That’s why I always tell people that I felt smarter whenever I finished a piece. Because every work demanded such self-exploration that by the time I got to the end, I always knew more about myself — was more in touch with myself. This is why the block hit me so hard emotionally. The less I wrote, the more detached I felt from my own being.

With every unfinished piece that slowly filled up my drive — Untitled Document 2, 8 and 14 — I became more scared of opening up another, sitting at my desk for hours, only to write nothing.

So I started avoiding writing — at least the creative kind. I turned to journalism, which felt manageable as its factual structure spared me the creative exhaustion that haunted my artistic work. I focused on other schoolwork, on calculus and U.S. history. But over the past two years, I’ve grown increasingly familiar with a sense I can only describe as feeling dumb.

I don’t really know who I am if not a writer. It’s the only thing at which I think I ever really excelled. I won awards that placed me among a pool of other talented young artists. I was accepted into programs that allowed me to meet those artists and realize how naturally we got along, how different it was being around them and being around the primarily STEM-focused students of my own high school.

It’s funny, though, because now that I really look back on things, even when I was winning all those awards or getting my pieces published, my perfectly curated author’s biography attached beneath, I didn’t even think I was that good. In fact, it was only once this slump hit that I began realizing just how much I’d managed to achieve.

I’m a second semester senior now. I got the leadership positions I wanted. I finished the college applications. I even committed to a college I once only knew through dinner table conversations and classroom daydreams.

But it’s never really enough. Here I am, trying to figure out what in the world I even want to study in college when before the answer would’ve been clear: English.

I feel like, in moments like this, I separate from myself. I hover above my own body, watching it sit at my computer, and I can’t stop myself from asking, “What more do you need?” 

I’m not sure if I’ll really ever get over the fear of trying to write, of trying to return to something once so familiar. But for now, I’ve been taking comfort in my longing. Because as much as I may have taken a step back from the intimate writing I used to do so much of, my appreciation of and hope to return to it with the same eagerness from before has never gone away. This is what reassures me I’ll return to it — that this gift hasn’t been, and never truly will be, lost.

As I type out this very column, I’m restraining myself from falling into a bad habit developed during this slump: the hasty deletion of any line I don’t immediately like. It’s too easy hitting that backspace button, so I’m trying to just keep typing, to write the next thought. It’s satisfying seeing the words trickle down the white page until it’s filled with the black shapes we call letters. Going from the first to the last word of a sentence feels like a journey, each clump of ink traveling further down the page, each pressing of my finger to the key like one small step forward.

Naomi Hsu is a senior at Carlmont High School in Belmont. Student News appears in the weekend edition. You can email Student News at news@smdailyjournal.com.