Thursday 9 June 2016

Flo Sunnen - Outgrowing, Still Writing, Just Because

FS on leaving Academia

Regardless, I am going to hold up my ‘writer’ card and write, just because. The reason this will be a personal rather than academic or generally ‘serious’ essay is that I’m still figuring stuff out. I’m a new member to the outside world, and by outside world I mean the vast expanse of space and noise outside of Academia. I’ve been a part of Academia for the past 10 years of my life, as a student, and I didn’t exactly plan towards an academic career or any kind of viable future inside the institution.
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Now that the context is different, and the structure is gone. I write and feel guilty for writing, for wanting to write. It doesn’t feel serious any more, doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere. The mindset has switched from ‘I am allowed – required – to do this’ to ‘Do I still belong here?’ Writing needs work even when no writing is being done, and a lot of this work is creating motivation, making the creative process feel like a valid way to spend a day, a life. So what I’m trying to figure out now is how to ward off the voice inside that says, ‘Do something better with your time’ or ‘There is no point to this’.
*
My official leave from Academia happened very recently, with very little fanfare: my student card simply stopped working and I was asked by email to fork over some money for the privilege to attend my own graduation. Like that's ever going to happen. The weird thing about it is that I thought it would be very different, and by that I mean I thought it would feel very different.
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It shouldn’t be that difficult to keep the routine going, the one I established while finishing my MFA project. Yet for some reason, writing inside an academic framework and writing in the ‘real world’ are two different beasts. The academic structure gives you goals, focal points, a whole system by which to evaluate your work; it gives you (more or less involved) supervisors, a peer group, sometimes even a place to work. You work has a context, a set of rules to follow, and a guaranteed audience.
*
I know that self-motivation and self-imposed deadlines are a thing, a thing many functioning adults do on a daily basis – I know about project management, whatever. The problem is that they’ve never been a reality, until now. Being outside of Academia is a vast field of decisions waiting to be made, decisions which need to be made by me rather than by anyone else; and the criteria are unclear. Inside Academia, you are a student, and then you work towards becoming an academic, I suppose. There are a limited number of roles, especially if what you want to do and be paid to do is write.
*
This is becoming about appearance, about seeming serious and grown-up. And about how quickly time passes when you are someone like me who takes a while to make decisions for herself.
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Outside of Academia, things are a little different. First of all, the existential dread of ‘what am I even writing for’ is harder to ignore. You’re not writing for your supervisor, for a mark, because it’s part of your degree.
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I started my Masters in Creative Writing in 2013, then moved on to an MFA in 2014, and it took me about two and a half years to start taking writing seriously, giving priority to my own writing process. Because this ‘maturing’, shall we say, took place within Academia, I now find myself lost outside of it.
*
Outside of Academia, you can potentially be anything, and that’s a lot to consider. Writing becomes vague, more self-conscious of its vagueness. You become more aware of not having anything to say, which wasn’t so much of an issue when you were still a student.
*
Sure, I've honed some of my skills by staying in Academia for so long, I've given myself time to figure out what I wanted to do, and, yes, I've in some sense accepted my own slow growth. But I've also protected myself from the chaotic vastness and confusion of the so-called "Real World", another institution, really, or cluster of institutions that lie outside of the academic fortress.
*
Outside of Academia is vaster and more confusing, but not all that different. I can still be rejected or ignored or made to feel inadequate, it's just that the criteria by which others can do so are less clearly defined – if anything, compared to Academia, there are more of those criteria for me to contend with.
*
During my 10 years, I did the most frowned-upon thing: I lived my student life as a full-time thing. By that, I don’t mean that my studies were always full-time, but rather that I didn’t supplement by getting a job or gaining experience (padding my portfolio, so to speak) outside of my studies, or even tried to gain experience working (teaching) at university. I was simply a student for 10 years, first in Philosophy, then in Creative Writing, and that’s it.
*
What I want to say to myself is this:
You've left Academia. That’s okay. You’ve chosen not to be an academic. That’s okay too. You want to write. This is not a crime.
*
I suppose the main problem is that, out here, writing feels more frivolous than it did during my degree. Coming from Philosophy, it took me a while to accept that writing could be a legitimate field of study, something to be learned and practised in a structured course. When I started accepting it, the writing itself became easier: I learned to immerse myself in writing as my ‘work’, something I was allowed to spend my time doing because I was doing it in the context of a degree – it was legitimate for me to sit around and think about writing because this was what I was supposed to be doing, this was what I was supposed to be learning, and, ultimately, what I would be marked on when I handed in my portfolio.
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Oh look, it’s everyone’s favourite: a personal essay.
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In choosing writing over the continuation of my student life I feel like I've escaped something that wouldn't have made me happy; at the same time I also worry that I've chosen the less admirable route, the one less likely to lead to success. Leaving feels like a failure (it's not that I'd been working particularly hard towards an academic career, I just always sort of assumed I'd end up in one), and I worry about what not wanting Academia more, not working harder at it, says about me. What it means is, I chose writing instead, which seems so frivolous a choice, especially given I don’t work at being a successful part of the industry.
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The problem is that I can't yet tell what will come of my decision. During the last months of my MFA, I did all I could to avoid the fear of what would come next. I told myself repeatedly I was doing the right thing, that I was giving myself and my writing a chance. I tried to convince myself that my writing would flourish outside of Academia, and so would I. I would be freed of a system of evaluation; my self-worth would no longer be rooted in praise and acceptance; my reading lists would be my own.
*
Without the assignments and deadlines, I'm not longer sure what it is I'm writing for, so I suppose it may as well be for myself. This won't keep me safe from rejection, of course, nor from criticism. The people who will do so will probably often be a lot less well-meaning, equipped with a lot less pedagogical training, and generally more confusing in their tastes than my professors used to be. Their feedback might be cryptic or it might relate to themselves much more than to my output. I might just be dismissed offhand.
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It's something to grow into, I guess.

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