As you may have read in my previous post, I was slow to learn to read but blossomed into a prolific fantasy reader. Flash forward a bit, and I studied English at Cornell University—I mean, why not? I liked reading and had always enjoyed English class … People just major in whatever their favorite subject in high school was, right? That’s what I did, anyway. And maybe it wasn’t the worst logic ever, but it wasn’t the right logic for me. Or maybe going to college at all wasn’t right for me. Or maybe Cornell university, specifically, wasn’t right for me. 

Whatever the reason, college was a struggle—not the work and the grades but the social aspects. I didn’t fall in with a group of rag-tag friends that encouraged me to experience new things. I didn’t get noticed by an esteemed professor and nurtured into greatness by their wisdom—or any of the other inspirational, transformative things that would surely happen in a book about a college girl. I engaged in my classes as much as I could, but I had more reading to do than was possible for any one person. Pushing through Moby Dick in one week just isn’t enjoyable! Especially when you also have a novel in german to read, a book on hunter gatherers to finish, and a bullshit science for humanities majors test to study for. 

For four years, I went to class, I did my homework, and I gradually lost my passion for reading. Everything I read was rushed and forced on me by a syllabus, and most of it was boring—not the exciting, adventure filled fantasy that had taught me to love reading. I also gradually stopped trying to improve my writing. I mean, why bother? I was getting A’s, and that was good enough … I was tired, after all. 

Years of intensive schooling had left me feeling burnt-out and unremarkable. If anything, the stress-mongering, unfriendly environment at Cornell tore me down rather than built me up. I left college with no idea of what I wanted to do in life and little desire to do much of anything. I tried … I tried to get through a masters in teaching but didn’t love it, I tried to find my niche in the corporate world but felt like I was decomposing at my desk, and finally, I just tried to hold a job—any job—that I didn’t hate and ended up working at an REI for four years. And in all that time, I didn’t read—barely, anyway. 

Reading had lost its joy, and it took me years to love it again—years to finally be able to lose myself in an engrossing book just for the sheer pleasure of it. During those years, I also spent a lot of time and energy trying to find a hobby that I could be truly passionate about—something I could even turn into a career that I loved. But I couldn’t figure it out. Of course, the jump from reading and studying English to writing is more of an incidental stumble forward than an enormous leap, but I had never seriously considered it. 

I was never that person walking around declaring to anyone who would listen that I would write my novel one day. Why me? What made me so special that people would want to read my books? My freshman year creative writing TA hadn’t liked my poems, and besides, writing sounded too much like work. And in my experience, work sucked. Work was the torturous, soul-sucking thing I’d spent years doing for school and that I never wanted to do again. Plus, even if I made myself do it—made myself sit down everyday and painstakingly type out a bunch of words in the right order—what were the odds I would ever finish? What were the odds my work would be any good or that anyone would read it? The odds hadn’t been ever in my favor.