The Class That Named What I Was Already Doing

Last night I turned in my final piece for Creative Writing and then just... sat there. Didn't open the laptop. Didn't check anything. Just sat on the couch with the printed pages on my knee and the lamp on and let the semester be over.

I signed up for this class on impulse, you might remember me writing about that, hovering over the course catalog and clicking before I could talk myself out of it. I genuinely thought it would teach me something technical. Sentence structure, maybe. How to make things better. And it did, a little. But the actual thing it did, the thing I keep turning over, is that my instructor handed back my first graded essay with a note in the margin that said 'this is already a form; trust it.' She was talking about the blog. I had written about the blog, almost accidentally, and she looked at it and said: this counts.

one last note in the margin

I think I'd been quietly waiting for someone to tell me that for a while and not admitting it. Like there was a version of writing that was real writing, and what I'd been doing on The Hartwells since 2007 was something adjacent, a habit, a journal, a lifestyle thing. The class didn't change what I was doing. It just handed me the word for it.

just sitting with it for a minute

So that's the end of fall semester. One more course to finish out, and then I'll figure out what spring looks like. But I wanted to write this down before the feeling goes flat, the specific feeling of being told you were already on the right road before you knew you were walking anywhere.