Official Writing Portfolio

Write. Just write.

Anything. About how much fun you had with your friends today. About when you have to go home for Ramadan. About how you failed another Computer Science course.

I stare blankly at the bleak page, with the lined paper feeling like it stretched to infinity. It almost seemed like it was laughing at the inaction my hand was taking despite my thoughts going a million miles an hour. My journal was this beautiful azure outlined in Persian designs reminiscent of the front of a Qur’an. I loved it with all my heart and yet, it was times like this I found it the hardest to write. The hardest to face myself, the feeling of forcing myself to write. It wasn’t a feeling I relished in, but it was too commonplace to find myself here again and again.

I eventually quit trying to make my hand move, to write, to find any thread of thought and follow it from start to finish. I audibly groaned, feeling alone in the sentiment of feeling too inadequate to write, thinking back to the last time I was here. The last time I had written in the journal was a month ago, and it only took having to take a legitimate break from life and having a week to myself with no academics and other stressors in order for me to find the writing I enjoy so much.

I remember the day I got the email notifying me that I had been nominated for the Minor in Writing by my wonderful professor, Shelley, from the writing program I had been in freshman year. It was heartwarming that someone was here at the University, actively looking out for me. And so I took the opportunity to reply back, to say that I would accept the offer and submit an application to minor in writing, mostly because I wanted to take a class with Shelley again. Okay, sure, maybe I didn’t know all the requirements and how it’d look into my future academic schedules. All I knew is that it would give me some stability in the already stressful and erratic environment that being at the University of Michigan so lovingly provided. The intro class I had signed up for was called WRITING 220: Introduction to the Minor in Writing.

Everything seemed interesting, seemed different, seemed engaging and thought-provoking. I didn’t find it a challenge to write in the class, but I found it a challenge to think about how I wrote, and broaden that thinking to other forms of writing – such as braided essays, zines, longforms, graphic memoirs, flash fiction and so much more. No matter where I was, where my mind was, writing was there to comfort me and tell me there’s so much more to writing than personal writing in a journal.

Weeks went by, some days absent and some days not. But I found myself hooked every time I had to turn in something, do something with peers, write something for the course. I walked into class sometime in the middle of the semester, and that day was about zines. I knew about the existence of them but never indulged in reading them. Perusing the many zines Shelley had brought to class and the assigned readings, I never realized how much writing could be about not writing. The design, the typeface, the layout, the order, the length of whatever writing is there, if at all, the exigence of the zines itself captivated me beyond belief. It baffled me that writing could achieve this, that it could continue to persevere in its absence. I had decided then and there that I would attempt to write a zine for my final project, to achieve the same things these authors and creators whose passions lay in front of me within their zines could do.

And man, was it hard.

I found myself crumpling papers with eraser marks everywhere, my hands dirtied with ink and lead trying to design something that spoke to me. Attempts made to create this zine failed each time. I’m not a very artistic person, and it’s something I try to actively work on, but this project alone made me hate working on this project. I felt incompetent, inadequate, insufficient when it came to working on this that I would avoid it just to avoid the negative feelings that came with it. And I think back, wow, these feelings sure feel familiar. I felt the same about my personal journal writing. That inadequacy to do something that was perfect on the first try, to create something and then leave it there, feeling it was flawless and no more was left to do. Conversations with Shelley and my peers led me to a different line of thinking – that no work completed is perfect. That “I’ve done enough” and “I’ve done a seamless job” are two different end goals, and that I should stop chasing the latter. Those feelings of inadequacy, they weren’t the problem. No, it was the fact that I let those feelings stop me from working on what I want to work on. The zines that I read, they weren’t done in either one try nor one day. Revising was the real nature of the work that I had signed up for, not perfection. It’s through feeling inadequate that we try something new, that we learn about ourselves in the process, that we see what we can do better in what we create. And that we learn more about the creative processes. I learned that I had to create something bad first to know how to create something good. So I picked up one of the crumpled papers, finished it, and then criticized it to all hell so that I may have a launchpad and a clear idea of where I want to go next.

Now I realize what this course offered me, four months later after just wanting a place to exist as a writer. I now exist as a writer who knows that bad writing eventually can lead to good writing. 

I open my journal back up, and start following one thread. One train of thought that wasn’t bad, that wasn’t good, but that just existed in the moment. And then it led to the next one, and the next, and the next. Eventually, I had stopped worrying about where to start and whether it was good or bad, and just wrote. Sure, the feeling of inadequateness was still there, but I was comforted more by the feeling that it’s part of the process, and that I’m more at peace knowing that I’ve written something at all. 

Now I’m filled with this longing to do the class over again, to do so many things better than I had previously done. But I let out a chuckle, and think that I essentially want to “revise” my time in the class just like I want to revise every piece of writing I had done. Learning this from my writing class was essentially just another life lesson, applicable to writing, yes, but now to everything that I want to do.

My zine is currently up on the Fully Realized Project page, so go feel free to check out what won’t be the last version of this zine.