intellectual autobiography

Writing as introspection has always been a part of how I have approached my intellectual life. Over the years, my reliance on writing, the process, the words, has steadily brought me to an awareness of various discourses about writing, language, social communication, and reality. These ways of acknowledging and exploring the importance of words in our engagement with each other and the world “out there” inevitably piqued my curiosity. While I have yet to focus exclusively on specific genres, themes, or theories with which to explore this curiosity, I am continually finding elements of engagement with these discourses in whatever text I study. My embrace of writing as living has only been a recent act, however. The turning point was perhaps when I examined in my application [essay] to graduate school in English this very concept of writing and reading as reflecting “a critical, imaginative, and explorative consciousness.”

As a way of understanding this conscious embrace, I often trace for myself the decisions that brought me to apply to graduate school. The major line of reasoning, what has come to be a conventional personal history, finds its roots in my fascination with narratives, stories of being. Up until high school, I read books whenever I had spare time. I loved the public library and remember countless times reading myself into nausea while in the car on the way home from the library. (Even though I knew reading in the car made me dizzy and nauseous, I could not keep myself from the books before we reached home.) I liked the way whole worlds came into being, and particularly, the way differing perspectives on being found voice within and between the books I read. But sometime at the start of high school, my father criticized me for reading too much, for being a bookworm. His words stuck with me, hovering amorphously in my mind for years to come. From that point on, a tension over the merits, the usefulness, of reading began to manifest itself as doubt and paralysis in my mind. I stopped reading books outside of class.

In some senses, this doubt and paralysis allowed me to expand my ideas about reading and words. Although I only kept a journal sporadically, I began to see that writing, the production of meaningful sentences, paragraphs, essays, was a way of approaching these narratives of being. I spent a lot of time in front of the piano, too, fascinated with this other language of music. I found in visual art drawing, especially a way of exploring narratives and textuality that freed myself from the accusation of being a “bookworm.” For the last two years of high school, I pursued both the performance of musical pieces on the piano and the creation of visual art as ways of getting around my (self-)imposed sanctions on words in books. Of note, though, is that I structured my art portfolio around ways of creating narratives visually. I also often incorporated words as texture and as meaningful/meaningless elements in my artwork.

If not for my parents’ growing criticisms of my artwork, of the unfeasibility of making art as a career, I would perhaps have continued more diligently with these explorations. As it was, I realized by the end of high school, when I was applying for college, that their expectations for me were single-mindedly pointed towards a career in medicine. At the time, I was still very unaware of what interested me, of the things that I wanted out of life, so their arguments for the stability (financial and otherwise) of a medical career swayed me enough to enter college as a pre-med student. Their financial support, too, was contingent upon my giving up art they forbade me to take any art classes while at school.

I labored for a year and a half in the fields of knowledge marked for a medical career. While I saw potential intellectual fulfillment in my immersion in these sciences, I also knew that there was something else that interested me, something more than a financially stable career with great social reputation and esteem. I realized that I had agreed in part to give up art because what interested me more was writing. I felt that writing somehow gave me a handle on the world, on living, on experiences, that I was not otherwise able to grasp. I took a creative writing workshop as one of my courses and a writing course based on daily, themed exercises. Both of these only confirmed my interest in understanding how writing could be an important part of how I perceived and approached the world. I made the definitive break at that point, re-acquainting myself with literature by becoming and English major.

The switch was not as idyllic and carefree as my parents believed, though. They thought that I found the science courses too difficult (there’s an element of truth in that) and was taking the easy way out with a frivolous major. I struggled to figure out the dynamics of the English department, the ways people spoke and wrote, and the ideas they dealt with. And even though I had a difficult time with my classes, I knew that these ideas, the questions raised in the novels and poetry we read, were what I wanted to spend my time doing. This struggle, coupled with the insistence of my parents that I was throwing my life away, made it difficult for me to take a wholly happy outlook on my decision. By the end of college, I was exhausted and knew I had to take some time off to relax and to think more clearly about what I wanted to do.

I spent the year after college living in Brooklyn, New York. I moved there with the intention of absorbing the cultural life, the performances, the music, the readings. A few months into my time there, I even enrolled in a creative writing workshop to resurrect my interest in writing fiction. I knew even then, though, that I wanted to return to school. I still needed some structure in my intellectual development. I needed other voices, other people, to engage with the ideas that interested me. But still, I was not sure what sort of graduate school to pursue. My interests ranged from literature to legal issues to the cultural weight of libraries and information. I applied, therefore, to graduate school in English, law school, and library science school. But when it came time to decide what program to pursue, I realized that the questions I wanted to ask about the law and about informational structures were all based in my interest in language and interpretation.

Now in graduate school in English, I am growing more and more confident that I will be able to explore what interests me through the field of literary studies. Although professional concerns are still up in the air for me, I have found through this first semester of classes, that there is an abundance of intellectual engagements for me to pursue as a literary scholar. The questions that remain with me, that become more developed as questions the more I read, write, and learn, are ones about the material body and physical realm, language as reality, and spirituality. What is real? How do various people see the mind and body? What, ultimately, is the “point” of life? Some of my obsessions are the television show, [Buffy the Vampire Slayer], contemporary fiction by writers interested in what things people do with their bodies, and the realm of cyberspace