Following the majority of monologues, I’m going to talk about my fear.
I’m here at Baruch because it’s a good school, it’s in the heart of the city, it’s my home. As many already know, Baruch is a business school, and I am here to be an accountant. Let me be honest, accounting is not what I want to do for the rest of my life, not even close. I want to be a writer, the next Edgar Allan Poe, the female version that is. I don’t want to do math, or business, I don’t want to do five years of schooling only to take orders from someone who thinks that they’re better than me. I want to write. I want to write poems, short stories, novellas. I want to be recognized for my creativity and the way people can relate to my work, not because of the way I crunch numbers and how fast I can add 42 to 58 and divide by 10.
And that brings me to my fear. I want to be recognized, I want to be liked. But not really as a person, for those of you who are in my classes, I’m usually in the back keeping to myself. I couldn’t care less about how people view me as a person, but as a writer, as a creator, as an artist, well that’s a different story. It’s hard to have two different opinions, “Wow, you’re a great writer! Show me more?” or “This needs a lot of work, this isn’t close to what was needed to be done,” because I never know who to believe. To have someone pick apart your work and treat you as if you are something off their shoe, it’s depressing. It doesn’t matter that I’ve won a writing contest, that I’ve been asked to compose a compilation of my poems and short stories, the words of those who degrade my work will forever be in my mind, it’ll be who defines me.
So why am I at Baruch? Baruch, for the most part, isn’t for creative writers. If one goes to Baruch, chances are they are going for business, which is what I am doing. In accounting, someone’s not going to degrade my work, telling me that it’s not creative enough. It’s simply whether or not my math is correct. I can take it if someone tells me that I messed up what 20 x 43 is but for someone to tell me that my creative outlet isn’t good enough for them, makes me not want to write anymore.
