Inhale, but don't exhale.

When I was in high school, I wrote a paper on the children's novel The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. While the book was sickly sweet at best, it was well written; and I wrote fondly of it as if it was worthy to share shelf-space with the works of Austen, Dickens, and many other great authors. Abounding in alliteration, replete with hyphenated adjectives, and tastefully garnished with figurative language (all literary devices employed by authors of the classics, including the aforementioned,) this essay exemplified the very best of my literary style. I felt that, with this essay, I had arrived as a writer.

My teacher praised my essay excessively to the entire class, announcing to my peers that they should all read my paper to see how good writers wrote. Faulkner once said that, "[The writer] has supreme vanity," and I was no exception. My pen was my most precious possession. My writing came from many painstaking hours during which, like Gene Fowler, I would "[stare] at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form[ed] on my head." I fashioned my lines from the sinews of my heart, gave them marrow from my own bones, and breathed the dust of my whole soul into their nostrils. I found the greatest expression of myself in words. I vainly wanted the whole world to read and admire my writing, but at the same time, thought it too sacred to share.

For my first real writing assignment at university, I chose a challenging but interesting topic, daring to take a risk. I wrote draft after draft, becoming intimate with the wastebasket and the great large "x" that expunged my many failed ideas. When I finally felt that I had arrived at something close to a final draft, I took the essay to the University Writing Center to be reviewed by one of my peers. After pouring over it for some time, the reader stabbed me in the heart with her red correcting pen. She told me that my sentences were too long (unfortunate, as one of my favorite paragraphs in literary history comes from a little known author named Charles Dickens and is a single sentence long,) my aptly used alliteration was distracting, and my metaphors were irrelevant if not superfluous. In the readers words, it had the "potential" to be a really good paper.

I broken-heartedly made the suggested changes (actually, much of the alliteration stayed as I couldn't bear to see it go) and took my paper to my professor for her critique. While she did not critique my style, she did set fire to a number of my ideas with which she "disagreed." The fact that I removed these ideas from my paper attested to the high regard in which I held this professor and her opinions, but it hurt nevertheless. With bruised ego, I composed my final draft and submitted it. The B+ I received on the paper sat like a stain on my soul and left a hole in my heart.

This experience only served as precursor to the startling and unfortunate truth about college: While university life may have been meant to foster learning and elevated thought, I found it as a community meant to stifle creativity. I no longer find pleasure in thinking about my studies, now that I know I must think as my professor does. I cannot design my own box and instead must fit into the too-tiny box that has been prescribed for me by my professors, often at the expense of a hand or foot or some other part of myself that must be sacrificed upon the altar of their expectations. If I expect to please my professors, I must submit my mind as clay in their hands to be stretched and pounded into something that they want me to become.

Thus, my worry comes when I consider that I may lose my identity at the expense of my so called "academic success." Must I sacrifice one part of myself for another part of myself? Is there a way to reconcile the two? I have yet to find a way to successfully link my creativity to academia. Perhaps, when all is said and done, I will have found that this was only a refiner's fire meant to prepare me to be bent into a new way of thinking and come out a fine new work of art. In that case, I suppose I will have to put up with stifling university life. I must inhale their thoughts, words, opinions; but exhaling my own is strickly prohibited. Who needs to breathe anyway?


And to Flannery O'Connor who said "Everywhere I go i'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher," I say that no one remembers you or what you wrote. Apparently, her teachers weren't good enough.