How Angst Changed My Life by Taylor Hicklen
[caption id="attachment_3433" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="The author, post-Angst-Countdown"]
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If you want to blame anybody, blame Nelly Furtado. When "I'm Like A Bird" hit the airwaves, I was in my formative years. I was struck by the mix of closure and melancholy, an emotion that would define the next decade of my life. The song followed me all through high school, and I'd hear it on weekends through my freshman year of college. To this day, I can belt it out word-for-word.
It took a spirited Twitter conversation and some negative feedback before I really translated that feeling to my writing. My twentieth birthday was quickly approaching, and I joked that soon I'd have no prerogative to angst. An idea emerged: why not make it a countdown? I'd get all of that volatile adolescent emotion out of my system, and my friends would get a laugh or two. I was still hesitant about the idea. Until that point, I'd never really delved into my personal life, at least not on that scale. People didn't want cute little anecdotes; they wanted story. I wasn't sure that I could deliver. And even if I did, who would notice?
I gingerly typed up the first few installments, keeping everything as neutral as possible. The feedback was sparse, and I thought to myself, Ha, I was right! Nobody wants to read this drivel. By that time, some other friends on Twitter had picked up the hashtag and kept prodding me for more. I was trapped by my own creation.
My twentieth birthday came and went, and still I struggled to think of something. I was an adult now. I thought I was supposed to push my emotions to the side, not compose multi-page blog posts about them. I resigned myself to staying in neutral blogging territory, but life intervened.
The story came spewing out of me. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't neutral. It was the best thing I had ever written, and it put me in an extremely vulnerable place.
This is how To Write Love On Her Arms explains it: Sharing is a chain reaction. Once one person opens up, another member feels like they can speak. I never thought that a piece about coming out to my best friend would incite such passionate reactions, but there it was.
Inadvertently, I had reclaimed what was lost in the transition between high school and college. I had forgotten that writing wasn't about word count, plot arcs, or narrative voice, it was about agency, about taking that deep, dark thing in my chest and molding it into something useful.
For years I had been focused on other characters' stories, but now I would write my own. I welcomed the challenge.
[/caption]If you want to blame anybody, blame Nelly Furtado. When "I'm Like A Bird" hit the airwaves, I was in my formative years. I was struck by the mix of closure and melancholy, an emotion that would define the next decade of my life. The song followed me all through high school, and I'd hear it on weekends through my freshman year of college. To this day, I can belt it out word-for-word.
It took a spirited Twitter conversation and some negative feedback before I really translated that feeling to my writing. My twentieth birthday was quickly approaching, and I joked that soon I'd have no prerogative to angst. An idea emerged: why not make it a countdown? I'd get all of that volatile adolescent emotion out of my system, and my friends would get a laugh or two. I was still hesitant about the idea. Until that point, I'd never really delved into my personal life, at least not on that scale. People didn't want cute little anecdotes; they wanted story. I wasn't sure that I could deliver. And even if I did, who would notice?
I gingerly typed up the first few installments, keeping everything as neutral as possible. The feedback was sparse, and I thought to myself, Ha, I was right! Nobody wants to read this drivel. By that time, some other friends on Twitter had picked up the hashtag and kept prodding me for more. I was trapped by my own creation.
My twentieth birthday came and went, and still I struggled to think of something. I was an adult now. I thought I was supposed to push my emotions to the side, not compose multi-page blog posts about them. I resigned myself to staying in neutral blogging territory, but life intervened.
The story came spewing out of me. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't neutral. It was the best thing I had ever written, and it put me in an extremely vulnerable place.
This is how To Write Love On Her Arms explains it: Sharing is a chain reaction. Once one person opens up, another member feels like they can speak. I never thought that a piece about coming out to my best friend would incite such passionate reactions, but there it was.
Inadvertently, I had reclaimed what was lost in the transition between high school and college. I had forgotten that writing wasn't about word count, plot arcs, or narrative voice, it was about agency, about taking that deep, dark thing in my chest and molding it into something useful.
For years I had been focused on other characters' stories, but now I would write my own. I welcomed the challenge.
