“you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows
how to love.”
—Warsan Shire
On my first day as a Teaching Assistant for E316, I arrived at my classroom early, dragged the desks into a circle, and waited at the door to say hello to students as they came in and took their seats. That day was just a syllabus day— we performed an ice-breaker activity and discussed expectations for the course. At the end of class, I shared with them one of my favorite poems. The poem was “for women who are ‘difficult’ to love” by Warsan Shire. When the bell rang the students put their desks back. Some said “thank you” or asked questions and then they left.
The next week we moved on, working on processes for close reading and really starting to get into the first texts on their syllabus. When class was over the students did the same— they pushed their desks back into place and loudly filed into the hallway— except one young woman. This young woman lingered, stopping me to say, “I just wanted to thank you for that poem you gave us last class. I really needed it. I taped it next to my bed so that I could read it each morning.” I expressed how glad I was and that I hoped she was feeling better, but as I left, I began to break down.
Graduate school has this strange way of trapping us in the minutia— the tests, the grading, the reading— both emotionally and intellectually. We agonize over the language of our seminar papers, the words to use when offering feedback for our students, the precise structure of an email to our professors. We mark our classes out by the minute, we carry agendas filled with appointments, due dates, and weekly goals. We become lost in the ever-turning machinery of productivity, eschewing a sense of self for the exhausted-but-competent academic veneer that we think will make us most likely to succeed. But what happens when the mask comes off? What happens when we have nothing left and pieces of our home-self slip into our work life like our carefully crafted veneers are nothing but finely painted sieves?
When that happens to me, as it happens to all of us, I turn to that moment with the young woman. I remind myself that it is okay to let it happen— to share your authentic, creative self with someone who might need it. I chose that poem to share with the class because, as a woman who has often gotten herself in trouble for her emotional intensity, I needed that poem when I found it. It may have helped my student, but selfish being as I am, I did it for me.
Now, I promised in the title that I was going to talk about creative self-care, and I will. However, I wanted to share that anecdote because I think that creativity looks different for everyone. I am a writer and a mixed-media artist, but you might be a creative teacher or a singer or knitter, or any number of things and that’s all perfectly valid. The point is, everyone has or should have some way through which they can let go of the minutia and become that finely painted sieve.
Creative self-care, or the act of engaging in some sort of creative pursuit/outlet, to me, is something so incredibly important in graduate school. I have been a writer all my life. In fact, during my last visit home, my mother found diaries from when I was six years old where I was writing poems about how much I loved my dog (I still write poems about my dog, but that’s beside the point). However, my first semester in graduate school, that all changed. I began to bow under the weight of a new home, new program, and new job and I quit writing. When the semester was over and all the seminar papers were turned in, I decided that I never wanted to see a blank Word document again. And so, I quit.
And so, I was miserable.
I found that the hole left by losing my will to write was not filled by watching hours of Downton Abbey or The Great British Baking Show. It wasn’t even filled with reading or listening to podcasts or music. As much as those things distracted me from the ever-looming specter of graduate courses and deadlines, they did not allow me the kind of creative release that I needed to survive. But I couldn’t write, so I didn’t know what to do.
Steeped in stress and growing depression, I made the decision that even if I couldn’t write, I had to do something. I tapped into my childhood self and started with construction paper projects— things that made me work with my hands, that I could linger over for an hour or two and then put away. When that wasn’t enough, I decided I would collage. I spent hours in used bookstores finding materials, placing images and textures haphazardly in multi-media journals, on canvases, and paper. Collaging turned into painting and, before I knew it, my practice had grown to combine both painting and collage. In my free time, I leaned all the way in. I set my apartment up like a studio, used the painting as an excuse to throw open my patio doors and get some sun. It became more than a distraction, it became a meditation, a need.
Collaging didn’t replace my writing, it fueled it. When I was burnt out of one, I would turn to the other. I’d use the images I created in my visual art to structure my written work and, all the while, I was still doing the work of graduate school. With my collage work, I found something that made me feel like I was finally prioritizing myself. It wasn’t about prestige or intellectual aptitude. It was something I was doing just for me.
Beyond the minutia, what I realized is that graduate school, for all its rewards and value, had made me so focused on the veneer that I had forgotten all about the heart. I had forgotten about the flesh and bone, the tastes and textures, the love, the interest, the curiosity. I had forgotten about the reasons I am here. I am not in graduate school for seminar and conference papers. I am not in graduate school to serve on committees or break myself with field reading, or even to make myself the most attractive candidate on the job market. Those things are each valuable and, certainly, I am always actively pursuing them, but they are not the reason that I am here. I chose to go to graduate school because I wanted the space to be curious, to pursue big questions, and to talk with others about books that I love (and sometimes books that I hate). I am going to graduate school because I love to teach. I love my students and their individual learning processes and competencies. At the core of each of these things is not minutia or prestige, but creativity. That is what collaging reawakened in me.
My creative practice is now something I engage with daily, be it writing, collaging, or painting. I always make time to put away the veneer and become the sieve. I look for opportunities to grow in that practice as I can, and those opportunities have been indispensable for me. This all said, I recognize that we are exhausted, overworked, and underpaid and sometimes it is all that you can do to make dinner, let alone work creatively. Certainly, the path that I have taken is just one among many and I recognize that I am quite privileged in my ability to pursue what I love and what truly fuels me. However, I just encourage those in graduate school, especially if you are just beginning, to lean into the things that remind you of why you chose to be here in the first place. Those reasons, those mantras, are sometimes all we need.
