autodidact
The only diploma I own marks my completion of the eighth grade. My formal education stops halfway through the ninth, and there is no equivalency certificate after that. A short-lived and ultimately rejected attempt at structured coursework at home and that was the end of it. I’ve told this one before: how my heart was in storytelling, I wanted to tell stories somehow, some way, and the traditional education system as I experienced it felt like an impediment to the vision I had for my life. I dropped out at fifteen to become the author I am today.
I had a fundamental incompatibility with that way of learning. Thought of that period of my life as crushingly grey. Twenty minute bus rides into the city. Hours wasted shuffling from class to class. Another twenty minute bus ride home, day too over to seize. I would stay up long past midnight to reclaim it. None of it felt like time well spent, but time stolen, lengthening the distance between where I was and where I wanted to be. It was a relief to leave.
One of the lasting impressions I have of that time was how afraid I was of being a student, and how I failed to recognize the privilege due to how consistently it was undermined by the particulars of my circumstance, of the environment in which I was taught.1 Among other things, how I processed certain information—namely anything unrelated to the arts—was not congruous with how I was expected to and it was intensely painful to come up short. I remember the thrill of understanding various concepts outside the purview of teachers quickly snuffed out by the embarrassment of having taken a longer amount of time and a more circuitous path to it than my peers. As a result, I dreaded learning. I was so suffused with the shame of not knowing, of being seen as stupid.
I think about that a lot: the fear of not having the answer overriding what should’ve been the excitement of possessing its question. I think of what wonderful discoveries that kind of fear turns you from, what it can evolve into—destructive forms of ego and pride, a sense of complacency where it feels less urgent to expand your perspective than to protect yourself from the inherent vulnerability of admitting how little you know by digging more into your lack. It’s a terrible thing when such vulnerability is betrayed by the figures of authority you entrust it to.2
After leaving, I worked through that anxiety until I was able to perceive the gaps in my knowledge as opportunities, and finally became a student of my interests—interests that expanded to and beyond subjects that had previously felt inaccessible to me in the place they should have been most accessible. I learned. Turned out I loved learning.
My career in publishing has taught me a lot, and there are things I can say for sure that I know. I could have continued moving comfortably within that sphere of knowledge, producing what would have been quality work, but there came a point, due to the particulars of my circumstance, where everything took on a familiar pall and something happened that forced me to reconsider everything I understood about my creative and professional life. Energy spent preserving the integrity of my existing work and protecting the most vulnerable parts of my process threatened future creative growth and fulfillment. My excitement and optimism, the heart, the engine of my art, died. The books behind me contain a spark that I will always be proud of, but I could not continue the way I had been without risking a level of compromise that would forever extinguish it, the results of which I would not be proud.
The years following that were a reckoning; stepping beyond my own understanding of one place to another where I was forced to admit that after all I had invested into my writing career, I knew much less than I thought. I became a student again.
It’s more apparent to me now than it was then. If you’ve been subscribed since at least 2022, my newsletter archives track my creative education. I looked to artists across mediums, to colleagues, to understand how they balanced their industry with their art, coped with capitalism’s abuse of their art, for insights on their creative processes. Directors, actors, singers, poets, painters. I was desperate to reaffirm what I believed was my purpose, to heal creative damage and to reignite a fire that had been smothered. I studied mediums that were not my own to make unburdened connections to art. I explored literary and media criticism to remind myself of what potentialities the work offers its witnesses, and what a powerful exchange that can be. From there, I rediscovered my love of reading, and the books I read reintroduced me to the allure and the importance of storytelling—something I’d once felt so strongly and so passionately about that I left school to pursue it. Engaging, deeply, with other author’s works resulted in intense conversations with my own, and a more intimate and gratifying understanding of my strengths and weaknesses, offering new heights to reach for, new chances—and ways—to grow.
It’s not where I imagined myself when I started, when considering my career down the road—but it’s where I have needed to be. And while I return to your inbox from August break to report that I have not yet reached 100 pages on my new manuscript (it gets closer and closer), the benefit of this ongoing education underpins its every sentence, and any frustration the story causes me is offset by its potential. The excitement of possessing its question, the search for its answer.
There was a time it might have shamed me to admit how badly, as an author, I burned out, where in the dark that left me, and how little it left me with. You feel so small sweating over those seemingly easy equations, the gaps in your knowledge declaring not only themselves but what they have deprived you of. I might have been embarrassed to arrive at these obvious solutions, whether reading more, writing more, reading about writing, writing about reading, studying your craft, redoubling your efforts, diversifying your input, listening to other artists in good faith . . . there was a time I might have projected something different outward to hold to an idea of myself as an author, even if it no longer applied, so that you would hold to it too. But I’m not interested in that kind of pretense. It gets in the way of my education.
Every time I log onto social, I’ll see one writer claiming to be an expert of the craft and another writer fretting they’ll never be good enough to become one. Be a student. Don’t be afraid to be a student at any stage of your work. There’s no end to creative knowledge and creative possibilities become boundless in its pursuit. And how wonderful that everything you don’t know about writing becomes something you have the privilege of finding out.
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It was a Catholic school so make of that what you will.
And alternately wonderful when it is nurtured and supported, which I would be remiss not to mention I also experienced at times.
I continue to love and value this series of posts so much.
Another insightful, candid and illuminating chapter in the book of Courtney Summers!💕