Now that I am in my final year at Queen’s, I have entered into an endless cycle of self-reflection. It’s probably borne of the fact that I feel so utterly different from when I first came here. The most obvious example of which is that I though I wanted to be a radiologist entering school and I’m leaving it as a fucking arts writer.
But there are more subtle changes, like those of taste and want and whim. I didn’t really drink before school and now I do, I didn’t listen to rap or anything really and pretty soon I am going to start getting paid to write about rap. I didn’t realize I loved poetry and art, or how much I need to have a someone in my life – a girl I mean – or how much I depend on my friends and family.
It’s not so much that I was in denial of these things, I just wasn’t aware of them if that makes sense. It’s a little paltry and certainly not profound, but I am not a profound person I don’t think when it concerns consideration of myself. I just am and am and am and somehow I manage to change along the way.
Perhaps that is why I am stuck in this looking back, some hope of tracing my past, its progress and pitfalls, with some hopes of exerting more control on my future. I am, for example, constantly thinking of five years plans. Of where I am trying to go in life. I know that I want to write but there’s so much to write about.
Do I want focus on creative fiction and non-fiction or something more academic and ascetic? Do I want to be a writer, an editor, a publisher? People are quick to say that there is no money in writing and those people are, to put it plainly, taking out of their asses. There’s money to anything done well in life, I am convinced of this and perhaps it’s borne out of a place of privilege or perhaps not. I just need to figure out how I want to make that money because most of what I do is done well. Confidence is perhaps something there’s not much of in writing.
-Clay
Clayton Tomlinson 