Winter break: that time when every college student realizes it is, in fact, possible to sleep for eight contiguous hours and reflects on the first twelfth (or for some, eighth) of their journey from scrawny adolescent to full-fledged adult. Friends and family are eager to hear about where you have been and where you are going (“what do you mean you haven’t chosen a major yet?”). You wish you could tell them you learned who you were, discovered the meaning of life, and met every one of your goals along the way, but the best you can come up with is, “yes, the weather really is a lot nicer in California.”
The truth is, I’m still trying to figure out who I am and what I want to do long term. It’s easy to say that you want to be the world’s first neuroscientist-engineer-writer who has a black belt and feeds starving children on the weekend, but reality demands compromise. Sometimes you have to make choices. Sometimes sleep or (dare I say it?) relaxation has to take priority. Sometimes you try your hardest, and you still don’t quite reach your goal. One of the hardest lessons I have had to learn over the past three months is how to compromise without giving up or forgetting what’s really important.
As a writer, it’s important not to be afraid of failure or rejection. As a student…well, the same is true, but we’re often conditioned to believe otherwise. It’s okay to try a new subject – as long as it doesn’t disrupt your four year plan. An F won’t kill you – but it might kill your dreams of med school. This kind of cognitive dissonance can be unsettling. To combat it, I try to keep three things in mind: everyone fails sometimes, failure is not permanent (you can always try again tomorrow), and failure is not necessarily bad (as my mom says, if you’ve never failed, it means you aren’t taking enough risks). There are few students who have never bombed an assignment and even fewer writers who don’t have a secret drawer full of rejections. I guess I’m lucky that my biggest failure this quarter was not blogging as regularly as I should have, but I am prepared to face larger ones if/when they should occur. I know that fear of failure can do more damage than failure itself if I let it hold me back.
With that said, I have a few goals for myself for the upcoming quarter: 1) write at least one blog post a week, even if it’s only tangentially related to science-fiction/fantasy and writing, 2) read at least one book every two weeks that has nothing to do with my classes, and 3) take a risk without dwelling on the possibility of failure. I’ll let you know how I do.
