An Unfinished “Potential Bad Blog Post” and Some Good Ole Interdisciplinarity

Today is the last day we can submit blog posts (does today being in December, negate the “November flurry”?) Anyway, I remember writing a blog post a few weeks into the semester about my frustration with blog posts, but also remember thinking I shouldn’t post it on the blog. I thought that these feelings shouldn’t be shared, and my idea wasn’t complete, so why should I post it? I think I knew I shouldn’t have posted it then, because I needed to give myself time for the idea to ripen, and to allow myself reflective moments, so I can see how much I’ve grown from my original writing of this post. My original post, titled in a word document as follows, “Potential Bad Blog Post,” goes like this:

As I am sitting reviewing my notes from class, searching for some spark of inspiration to write a blog post, I feel incredibly at home with our professor’s analogy of “banging my head against a wall.” Assign me a creative writing piece? Done. Written, edited, with my name proudly stamped at the top (or bottom.) But, here I am picking my brain for something to write about relating interdisciplarity, and Cane. When I say “here I am,” I mean, I have been opening the same word document with embarrassing starts to blog posts for three weeks. Three weeks? That’s unlike me… I do my assignments. All of this internal complaining, and mind blanks have led me to the affirmation that I don’t love literary English classes the way I love creative writing classes, but that’s why this is so important. I would rather read a bad romance novel, than something that will enrich my sense of self, or sense of the world (don’t tell anyone that.) I would rather write about my feelings than about a character’s (notice how that’s exactly what I’m doing?) I would rather be given a prompt and come up with a story than try to decipher the meaning behind an object that I don’t understand.

Recently, I have been deciding between majoring in what’s easy and fun for me, verses what’s hard but important. I just decided to go with the latter and that’s why I am committed to challenging myself with finding things to write about. Just because I don’t love this, per say, it’s important. In order to grow as both a writer, and a human, I have to learn from past literary works, and get out of my comfort zone. So, self, and audience, how does this all relate to what interdisciplinarity?  

And there^ I left myself a nice cliff hanger for my future self to deal with. So how does this relate to interdisciplinarity? Well, I think now, that in a vague sense, this post was amidst my “what should I major in?” breakdown. This breakdown ultimately is the definition of interdisciplinarity. What combination of subjects should I study to get to point B? That is interdisciplinarity– the combination of different subjects to reach an outcome. I have realized that while I love English, it is something I can do in my free time. There are so many things I want to study, and learn, and do with my life, that English can be a hobby. I will always love writing and reading, but I don’t want to be a writer, per say. While I know you can do so many things with an English major or minor, it just doesn’t fit in my schedule.

Pertaining to my unfinished post, I ended up not dreading the blog posts. If only I could go back in time and tell my struggling self to chill out, and just write, I would’ve saved so much time and so much frustration. However, I have learned from this, and I don’t regret straining to find ideas and having trouble with my posts because it helped me grow, and that’s all I can ask for.