The Write Edit Review

I never got to walk the stage for my undergrad. The pandemic had hit that March, making any large gathering’s come June out of the question.

At the time it didn’t bother me because I had already received my acceptance into the master’s program, which meant I’d get to do the whole shebang again in another two years, anyways. Flash forward three years—writing memoir about childhood traumas while isolated in a one-bedroom apartment didn’t exactly come naturally, so finishing my thesis felt like pulling teeth—and I finally got to walk that stage. Wore my cap and gown, took photos with my parents, and celebrated the end of almost a decade in school.

Only to get trapped in the real world.

The thing about university? It gives me purpose. A plan. Finish the reading, finish the assignment, finish the exam and semester and year so I can do it all over again until I complete my program. Four years (in theory) for my undergrad and two years (in theory) for a masters. I took longer for both, stretching my time at university for a solid chunk of my twenties—essentially all of my adult life. So once my academic career ended and I moved to a small city in the South Okanagan, I found myself… lost. No plan, no real job prospects, and worse?

No writing routine. Just… blank pages.

During my bachelor’s, professors always said, “Writing is a solitary practice. You’ll need to build community.” It didn’t register for me because at that time, my whole writing process revolved around working closely with others. Workshops had an average of ten students who each read and reviewed my work, gave me immediate feedback, and grabbed coffee or drinks with me each week. We shared ideas, laughs, disagreements, and an awful lot of camaraderie—nothing solitary about it.

In my masters program, that level of connection only intensified. All of us lamented grading undergrad work, the writing of our own thesis projects, and the pressures of not disappointing our advisor. We attended seminars and picked apart ideas, challenged one another and interrogated what it meant to “create,” because campus is truly a glorious place where everyone has some new insight or idea on the tip of their tongue. The energy is infectious, pulling you into the tide.

But one thing my professors never wanted me about was what really happens when the the program ends, leaving you washed up on the shoreline. There’s this stalemate in creation—a malaise.

A staggering percentage of Fine Arts students stop creating once they leave school. Without the expectation of assignments or required work, we suddenly get lost to the demands of real life: bills, work, relationships, chores. It feels indulgent to write. Selfish, or maybe even naive. There’s no guarantee it’ll go anywhere, and when you want to build a life and buy a house and one day settle down, art doesn’t seem so lucrative to a steady and reliable paycheque.

After graduation, when I thought about writing an essay or short story, or heaven forbid, a whole novel, I’d get slammed with an overwhelming wave of guilt: “I should be working,” I said. “I need to make money.” And as almost all writers know… there’s no money in this.

It’s also jarring to step away from campus—where ideas float on the wind as commonly as weed smoke—and discover that the rest of the world doesn’t care as deeply as you do about stories, about how they predate language. New coworkers in a job that has nothing to do with art just want to make enough money for their next Mexico trip. Bosses want ROIs and ETAs on deliverables, hopefully by EOD. Friends are struggling with aging parents and the demands of their own children and changing bodies, and meanwhile I want to write a story?

And maybe it’s that I’m older and I don’t have the energy to stay up late or wake up first thing to read complex creative discourse ahead of class. I want stability, to burrow into my home and nest, and not hustle and scrape and grind. I did that for my entire schooling, grasping at opportunities and working to get ahead, to be smart, and professional, and important. I care about hard work, but these days it feels like I can’t put 100% into both building a career and writing creatively.

How do I balance?

In that first year after I graduated, a friend from my undergrad days reached out to me, and when I told him I felt lost he said, “God, it’s only been twelve months, of course you do! It took me five years to settle on my feet when I finished school.”

It’s a complex transition the program ends, especially in an MFA. There’s no set path ahead of you. We aren’t nurses, or teachers, or journeymen with clear job expectations—we have no security or required labour. That project you’ve poured your heart and soul into for the last few years might end up going nowhere (which is okay, by the way), tossed into a box along with the rest of your memorabilia.

The next chapter of life feels messy and scary and unclear.

It’s hard to build a creative practice on your own. Hard to trust in the importance of your words when no one is there to cheer you on. The only thing I’ve really learned in the two years since I graduated is that community is the key to fighting the solitary nature of writing. And it won’t look like it did in university, with peers your age that you see multiple times a week. It comes from building your own little corner of people who see you and acknowledge the journey you’re on, no matter where you’re at.

If you’re struggling through that post-MFA or post-BFA or just post-university malaise, you’re not alone. It’s tough out there, alone in the weeds, but I hope you’re able to fight through it and find your own community, however big or small that looks.

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