“We have a lot of fun here,” said a Brown Daily Herald staff member with his shoulders tensed up to his ears, in a tone so serious you would think he was delivering tragic news. Maybe the copious amount of devastating news he reports on the Daily has altered his perception of “fun.” The amount of stress I felt radiating from their Zoom screens was enough for me to leave the call immediately. Right as I was about to click off, I was met with the warm and welcoming voice of a young woman: “If you are interested in joining post-, the magazine of the BDH, then hop into our breakout room!” Figuring what the heck, I followed the friendly faces into the post- Zoom, and what started as a quick chat with section editors turned into my longest-term commitment at Brown.
There are a number of reasons why my post- stint endured through my days as a (so-called) Pre-Baccalaureate-First-Year-Fall-2020 “Special Student,” as a depressed and burnt-out sophomore, all the way into my last few weeks as an undergraduate at Brown. The main reason: I needed a creative outlet. Regardless of my state of being, I could always find something to say, something to talk about, something to attempt to articulate. If I needed to process my anxieties about who or what I wanted to be, to dissect my own brain to better understand the maze of my mind, or to just distract myself from the internal mayhem that consumed me, I would write. This was something I did for my own self-care, and other people just happened to want to read it. Even when I felt I had nothing to say, or nothing worth saying, I would write anyway. I would write until something stuck. I would feel a spark of creativity and run with it as far as it would take me.
Having the commitment of writing for post- has been a blessing for my personal and artistic growth and improvement of my craft, but it has been difficult in weeks where I do not feel particularly creative. What do I do when writing feels like getting out of bed during a torrential downpour? When I just want to stay under the covers where it is warm and safe? It feels antithetical to being an artist to somewhat “force” any sort of art. There are days when I just do not feel like writing, or when I have no idea how to word anything in a way that I like. On many of those days, I just need a change of scenery to inspire me to find something that feels important to see. Other days, I just need to roll with whatever mediocrity I am producing. With time, I find my rhythm and voice, and I weave my words and sentences into a tapestry that holds grave and powerful truths—some of which I am only now discovering for the first time.
As much as I love all of the non-writing-related things I do, including the math I study and for which I will receive my degree, I am a writer at heart. There are people who like to write poetry, and then there are poets. I identify as the latter. My soul calls for me to take my strings of beautifully intricate thoughts and thread them through paper. I live for sitting on a bench next to strangers and watching the sunset. I love grocery shopping and paying attention to what other people gravitate towards but eventually put back. I treasure walking along the beach and imagining the stories each seashell holds of the long, glorious life that led it to be here with me in this moment. I am enamored with the ordinary and I find stories everywhere I go. When I write, I draw out these stories and I fall more in love with the way the world and I see each other. Words are the closest answer to my insatiable curiosity about everything there is to see, to feel, to experience. I often wonder if others feel the same way as I do.
I am going to miss my regularly scheduled post- revelations, where I learned to make a little more sense of my reality, one piece at a time. Without a writer’s schedule, it is up to me to keep sharing my stories, because nobody will be waiting for me to share them on a certain day, at a certain time. I still have so much left to say, and so much left to discover and create and articulate. In the realm of my ongoing life anthology, my post- produced pieces are only the preface.
**In my next body of work, I will serve as a math teacher in Providence. I will share my craft with my students as they learn to process, embrace, and convey their own narratives.**
