This one’s a little more personal.
I often like to make jokes about the value of the university course I’ve chosen and how I’ll ultimately come out of it as the same person. These are, however, jokes, and they’re intended to reflect that foreboding existential crisis that every final year student probably deals with: Your time in education is almost over. What purpose will you have when left to your own devices?
Anyway, that’s a crisis for another blog post. I’d like to discuss how this university course (BA Hons Creative Writing) has shaped part of me as a person. And whilst I’d like to reiterate how I’m against blogging about myself personally, this one actually develops the reasons as to why that is.
When I began university, I secretly thought of myself as a sort of… prodigy. Just typing that hurts, but it’s true. I never swaggered about, rubbed it in people’s faces, or made hints to some inner greatness that lay within. (At least, not to my memory.) But I felt special, one of a kind, like I’d been through a unique journey that had shaped me into the prime, writing being that I was. I was Kristian goddamn Richmond, ready to take on the world by storm.
You might be expecting to hear that my first feedback was disastrous, that I’d written terribly and was too full of myself to see past my flaws. In fact, my feedback was basically telling me I was average. My writing had issues, it had merit, and it was a strong base to develop on. I wasn’t disappointed. I just thought, “Wow, if that’s the feedback I get for this hasty scrawling, imagine what I could achieve if I truly put my all behind a piece of writing.” And I went away. And I handed in more work. And I got more fair, average grades. And I continued to lie to myself.
I’m fairly quiet in my class, at least when compared to being in other social circles. But whilst I may not be overly talkative, I do observe and listen and come to understand those around me, and as we shared work and got to know each other I came to realise that I was normal. This special aura that I fancied myself to possess dispersed, mostly without my knowledge. Our lecturers spoke of the lives and loves of the writers we studied, and some come in regularly for us to meet and listen to. And slowly but surely, I stopped believing that I was some undiscovered star. I was a student writer. And I was, and am, very much still learning.
If anybody from this class is reading this, I would like to emphasise one point to my defense: I never looked down on any of you, or saw myself as above. I simply saw myself as outside, removed somehow, not better but developed differently, in a more unique way. And for the record, I realise now that this was utter rubbish. We all have our complexities, our unique traits, and specialties which define us. We all have our stories.
It was not until I’d seen some posts on various social medias from other university students that had begun their courses this year that I stopped to reflect upon my own development thus far. I saw shades of my own past conceit within them, and only then stopped to realise that it was gone. And for the people I’ve met and the hands that have guided me, I cannot thank them enough.
Finally, in relation to blogging, this journey away from self-admiration marked another change for me. I came to realise that nobody would be particularly interested in the thoughts of some random guy who wanted to ramble on about himself in this particular light. Just writing this blog post has been difficult enough; reading back over it, it feels pretentious, self-congratulatory and shaming. But I wanted to write a blog post on the necessities of learning to be humble, the flaws of holding oneself in a spotlight, and the value of any university course (or any path in life) in how it can help you develop as a person. And you know what, screw it, I still can’t write about myself without a lengthy disclaimer at the end!
Echk.
Perpetually Perturbed 