Fall 2022 Life Roundup
A reflection on my first semester of graduate school & fall 2022.
After a year of taking time off from school just to exist, Fall 2022 I entered graduate school. I think I’m in a position to say I am happy with this decision, especially with the school I chose. A very important thing to me was that I did not go into debt for graduate school, as a lot of major universities in the United States charge an arm and a leg for graduate school. One master’s program I was looking at literally advertised they only gave $3,000 in scholarships for a tuition that was $42,000 a year. Because I went to the school that I did, I am paying completely out of pocket and taking on no additional debt to my undergraduate loans.
But this semester, considering I was working about fifteen hours a week and taking three classes, was kind of stressful. After a year of doing virtually nothing, I can see why I was stressed with the sudden amount of work I had to do. I also have to commute thirty minutes one way just to get to school. I learned to cope with that by listening to audiobooks throughout my driving time, and even learned how to train myself to listen to them more than 2x speed.
Let’s talk about the fall.
Had some failures.
I feel like social media is such a highlight reel most of the times. I’ll admit, I tend to avoid it. I post things and run. I don’t like to interact with people that much even in my daily life sometimes, so I tend not to like anything and briefly look at stories if I’m really bored. People probably think that I’m probably such a hustler who gets everything she wants, but that really is not the truth.
As a writer, I’ve been off sending my work into the world for awhile now. Fall 2022 was a bit of a dry spell as I got back into the swing of things, especially as I think I’m creating some of the best work I’ve ever written during the past year or so. Yet, at the same time, the poems I think are absolutely brilliant are getting rejected everywhere. They’re always personal rejections, but it starts to get to you psychologically after some time. My latest chapbook, too, has not been getting any traction.
Some other random things I tend to deem as failure: my frustration to not cook new things (my sister is an extremely picky eater, thus I’ve become really frustrated with cooking because she’s picky enough that, for example, she’ll only eat chicken if it’s cute into a kind of particular cube), I really neglected this blog (I did not write a single post for months), and a lack of growth on social platforms outside of this blog.
& some successes.
I think I became really good at time management during this time. Somehow I was still writing my little poems consistently and finding time to read despite being overwhelmed with the doldrums of existence. I did get a couple of poetry acceptances from good venues, got sent to the New York Film Festival for work, made a lot of money compared to what I was making before. I also submitted to the Arthurs Flowers Flash Fiction Prize completely on a whim and somehow ended up as a runner-up for my little piece about a Middle Eastern actress not finding the kind of roles she wants in Hollywood.
Life (and socializing) is hard.
I live at home and in the United States, so I know my privileges here as well. My tuition is about $6,000 a semester, and I work about three to four consistent freelance and regular gigs in order to make the sure the bills are paid at the end of the day. That means I picked up a job on campus where I have to consistently talk to people, which is something I struggle at. I also made a vow to myself that I would make friends while in graduate school, that I had to make sure I went out and talked to people lest the possibility of going insane was very real, and I overcame that. Granted, I still hate texting and messaging people, but at least I talk in real life.
Keep your eyes on your goals.
One of the few things keeping my sanity and life together are my to do lists and goals I outline on my Notion every single month. I’m someone who has to set mildly unrealistic goals in order to keep myself working hard in order to achieve them, and it gets me fairly productive. I’m also such a major website stalker for the writers I admire and want to be, and I’ve finally come to peace with the fact that most good things take time. I don’t have to be a twenty-two year old with a major book deal and 100k Instagram followers. Most of the people I think are cool and doing great things didn’t hit their stride until they were almost thirty. Hell, I don’t even have an MFA and I think I’m doing good for myself.
