There’s a lyric in Kanye West’s “Touch The Sky” that perfectly captures the essence of my first year in Texas State’s MFA Program. In the lyric, Kanye recounts a moment in his life before he was famous, “[b]efore anybody wanted K. West beats,” where he’d have frequent nervous breakdowns when weighing the level of talent of his contemporaries against his own. I remember listening to “Touch The Sky” somewhere near the end of my first semester in the program and getting chills.
“This is exactly what I’m going through,” I said to myself, and it was true.
The first panic attack I’d ever had in my life happened on the first day of class, in my first workshop. I wasn’t even the one being workshopped, but I was paralyzed by anxiety. The praise I had prepared for the piece was shallow in comparison to those of my classmates, and when it came time for suggestions or criticism, I could only say, “This piece feels finished.” Before saying any of that, though, I had a panic attack and felt the vocal floor beneath me fall out mid-sentence like in Looney Tunes when Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff but only falls when he realizes there’s no ground beneath him. To put it bluntly, my first year in Texas State’s MFA program was a much-needed deconstruction of ego and intuition—only, I didn’t know it then.
Writing with depression is pretty much the same as doing anything with depression—procrastination, a fear of failure, an ability to keenly see exactly what it is you need to do and how to get there, but being unable to find the motivation and spiraling because that lack of motivation feels inherently, morally bankrupt. However, the benefit of it, if you can call it that, is that writing is a solitary art. You don’t have to perform for anyone or play a role, and failing to produce work on any given day, while devastating, doesn’t let anyone else down, doesn’t affect anyone else.
I think the solitary nature of writing is a big part of why I’m a writer, and for a longtime, it served me well. I breezed through my late teens and early twenties by folding inside of myself. My depression was manageable as long as I could set aside time to embrace it in my own way, shut out the world, tell friends that I couldn’t hang out because I was busy honing my craft. It was masking the problem, but it didn’t feel like artifice or avoidance. It felt like actualization. If I hadn’t gotten into an MFA program, it probably would have continued this way, but I might not be as strong of a writer as I am today.
In some ways, the MFA feels at odds with what it means to be a writer. There’s a huge emphasis on community and comradery, while at the end of the day, you still have to go home alone, do the thing alone, regardless of how many readers or writer buddies you have. I have to admit, when I entered the program, I resented this. For someone like me, it was horrifying. Because of how insulated I had made myself, I was the best writer I knew, and being confronted with the fact that there were plenty of writers better than me, sitting right next to me in class, was a hard pill to swallow.
I had panic attacks at pretty much every turn in my first year in the program—paper due dates, workshop days, nights at the bar with classmates. I was absolutely certain that I had been accepted into the program by mistake or because of some aspect of my background—anything but my writing. What’s funny, though, is that the cause of this distress (this emphasis on community) was also, in some way, the thing that helped me get through it. The Zoloft also helped, I’m sure, but that’s a different blog for a different time.
It was certain members of my cohort, Jeff Karr, Luke Helm, Caroline DeBruhl, who, through their openness about their own experiences with depression and anxiety, helped me feel a little less alone. The more I pushed myself to embrace the community (as best as I could, in my own way), the more I started to understand that them being better than me, having more talent than me, having read more books than me, was exactly what I needed if I wanted to become a better writer. It may sound strange, but I needed to feel inadequate because it meant I had so much more to learn. I sat down, was humbled, and came out better because of it.
If I had one thing to say to someone entering the program dealing with depression and anxiety (I know they are separate things, but in my experience, one begets the other, a snake eating its own tail) it would be simply: embrace it. Run headfirst into every social interaction, masters class, Q and A, and MFA reading, even if its terrifying, even if you’re worried others will find you out, will discover you’re not the greatest writer on the planet, because it just means there’s a better you out there, waiting.
Daniel Cervantes is fiction writer born and raised in Houston, Texas, now in his third year in Texas State University's MFA Program for Creative Writing. He loves basketball, Haruki Murakami, and smoking too many cigarettes.
