Shecoria | Essays on Becoming

When I was younger, I used to write a lot of poems. In high school, I submitted them to my school’s literary magazine, and in college, I eventually made a literary magazine of my own. I loved melancholy. Apparently, saying for the eighteenth time that I was depressed and alone never stopped feeling cathartic.

Sadness was easy to write about. Not necessarily easy to experience, but easy to turn into something. There was always a metaphor hiding somewhere in it. Loneliness could become an empty house. Heartbreak could become a season. I could stare out of a window for long enough and suddenly have three stanzas.

But I am at an age now where I love my life.

This is obviously a great problem to have. I don’t particularly want to become miserable again for the sake of producing better poetry. Still, I’ve been thinking about what happens to us creatively when the version of ourselves that built our style doesn’t really exist anymore.

As we change as people, we change as creatives. I know that. What I don’t know is what that adaptation is supposed to look like.

Have I outgrown the medium that helped make me the person I am today? Or do I need to rebuild my style and figure out what actually reflects my life now? How do I write about loving sunshine and cosmopolitans without it sounding like an adult nursery rhyme?

There is something about sadness that feels inherently profound. Maybe that’s because sadness asks so many questions. Why did this happen? Why do I feel this way? When will it stop? Who am I without this person? What does this say about me?

Happiness doesn’t always demand that kind of investigation. Sometimes I am having a good day because it is a good day. My friends are around. The weather is nice. My drink tastes good. I have somewhere to go later. There isn’t always a hidden meaning underneath it.

And yet, I don’t think I’ve become less emotionally deep just because I’m happier.

When I was younger, emotional depth looked like a pit. I would fall into a feeling and stay there until I had written my way out of it. Now I think of emotional depth more like a pool. I can immerse myself in a ton of feelings without drowning in any particular one. I can move through them. I can examine them. I can even enjoy them. And when I am ready, I can get out.

Maybe that’s what my writing has to learn how to do too.

There are still plenty of things I don’t understand. If anything, being happy has given me entirely new things to be confused about. I think about how strange it is to finally get things I spent years wanting. I think about how quickly life moves when you’re actually enjoying it. I think about friendship, love, ambition, aging, family, and whether I am appreciating any of it enough while I have it.

Sometimes happiness creates its own kind of anxiety. When your life is bad, you spend a lot of time imagining how good it could become. When your life is good, you suddenly have something to lose.

That feels worth writing about.

I don’t want my work to become casual breakfast reading. I want it to have some emotional weight. I want someone to finish something I’ve written and keep thinking about it while they’re doing something completely unrelated later that day. Obviously, I don’t need to trauma dump biweekly to accomplish that.

Maybe what I’m actually mourning isn’t my sadness. Maybe I’m mourning how easily sadness gave me something to say.

Back then, writing was often a place to put feelings that were too big for me. Now I have to go looking for the question underneath them. I have to pay closer attention. I have to be inquisitive instead of simply overwhelmed.

I think there is something beautiful about that.

Maybe I haven’t outgrown the person who wrote all of those sad poems. Maybe she just taught me how to look inward. I still get to use what she gave me. I just don’t have to live where she lived.

There are worse things than having to learn how to write from the sunshine.