Learning about life and writing is truly is a long-term process.

Something I’ve always come to notice about my generation, which can be classified as Generation Z, is that many of us feel an anxiety to get things done, to perform as well a someone who’s late in their career. Whether it’s money, success, or fame, we want it immediately.

There’s a sense of instant gratification expected from a lot of acts, and because of it, a lot of young writers and artists especially see certain things as a fast track to becoming like their idols and icons.

I was talking with my good friend from high school one day through text, and we were mentioning how despite the fact we went to a competitive high school for writing, we never had an idea of what the writing teen world was like online.

This led me to reflecting on my career so far as a writer, and how at twenty-three I am ready to enter a completely new phase of my life as a writer and an artist. Sure, I haven’t been writing a ton lately, but I’ve certainly been collecting a ton of life experiences and living life in a way where I can write about it later.

Anyways, I thought to make this blog post and document some of the things I’ve been thinking about lately, as it might help someone else out there.

It’s time to stop looking at social media.

I feel so much relief in my life knowing that I was never on Twitter during my high school years, or it might’ve ruined my pathway as a writer. I see a lot of talented teen writers and have taught workshops before, and so I’ve also noticed some short change themselves by pandering towards what XYZ competition or publications wants to see.

There’s so much to explore throughout your lifetime, and when you try to perform for other people as an artist, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

I don’t go on social media a lot, and I prefer Instagram over anything else.

Writing is a very solitude act and I like to follow fellow writers whenever possible, but it makes me really anxious when I see a steady stream of people talking about their accomplishments. I know I do it on my own account, but I’m growing into the fact as an adult that I don’t have to subscribe to these things anymore. I can follow my own path, and that probably won’t involve an MFA.

I’m making more connections learning about the world.

I pursued a master’s degree in something unrelated to writing and its craft, and it’s called Global Humanities. Having an interdisciplinary degree and teaching mode has seriously made me realize that my writing is about documenting the world and things I’m observing around me.

When you only read one kind of narrative throughout your life, it becomes your truth and the only way of looking at the world. This becomes a major question as a writer because you have to confront there’s a lot bigger issues than nature appearing pretty, like climate change, or how every action has a reaction.

Growing up as a writer for me is making these connections and figuring them into my writing. I currently am working on a Fulbright application to do documentary poetics in India, and without my master’s degree, I don’t think I could’ve done it properly.

A lot of what I have to consider are the ethics of what I am going to do there, but it also forces me to confront my own privileges and roles in cross-cultural dialogues through writing.

I don’t have to be constantly publishing work.

This is a big one. I used to submit all the time, and it’s why my publications list was so lengthy by the time I was a college graduate. Part of maturing and becoming a better writer is realizing craft and what it takes to form a good piece of writing (although good is subjective here).

When you’re filtering your life through the prism of publishing and needing to get your work out there constantly, you’re selling yourself short when it comes to allowing pieces to marinate.

So I submit only when I feel like it, which isn’t as often as you think. The summer of 2023 I barely sent my work out into the world, although I kept a fairly consistent writing practice.

This also allowed me to sit down with the world and consider what was in it more, and take notice of little things through an extended period of time. I do think I’ve been writing some of my best pieces this way, but when I was constantly submitting, I wasn’t as happy with my work.

Art and writing manifest in different ways.

I spend a lot of times at art museums and in different kinds of creative spaces, which means I’ve thought a lot about art and what it means to create something with impact.

This blog has been a different form of reflecting as well—it’s a living space that has allowed me to sit with my feelings, writing reviews and thoughts about what I’ve been reading, watching, and seeing out in the world. But this kind of practice has led me to realize there’s no set path, nor is there a defined standard of what I can and cannot do.

Humans love order, and as I learned in one of my classes, it’s a very human tendency to force an order if someone feels there isn’t one there. But visiting all these different places and consuming so many different kinds of perspectives has taught me the valuable lessons in exploring beyond the normal order you’re used to.

Resistance on an individual level is a small ripple in a large pond, but it’s still there. That’s something I want to remember for the rest of my life.

And, as I mentioned before, none of these revelations came immediately. They came as I grew up and understood myself more.

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