Learning lessons in reverse
As Taylor Swift once said, ‘Looking backwards might be the only way to move forward’
By GEETIKA MAHAJAN — giamahajan@ucdavis.edu
I used to think that being a good writer meant that the words came naturally to you — which is why, for so much of my life, I’ve never really considered myself to be one. In high school, my involvement with the newspaper essentially equated to fulfilling tasks on a to-do list: I wanted to be Editor-In-Chief, so of course I would have to be a section editor for a year first and a staff writer for a year before that. When I got to university, I assumed that I would follow the same map to “success”; I never considered that my goals could change, or that I might edit my roadmap or that one day, I might even write just because I like writing.
When I think about first-year me, applying to the Aggie with those goals in mind, she’s so foreign to me that I almost feel like those events elapsed in a dream. I started my time here thinking about writing articles as a means to an end, something that made me feel like my brain was filled with old rusty gears. I could only sit with that discomfort when I knew what I was getting out of it.
University, however, is very different from high school (duh). In my first quarter at Davis, I read articles about the obsolescence of the prison system and Marx’s theory of alienation. I read papers and felt like they were adding new dimensions to the world. Inevitably, I wanted to write things like this too; I wanted to take a popular way of thinking and look at it in reverse.
To be honest, the rusty gears feeling never really went away — even as I began to organically find new things to write about. I spent my third year as an exchange student, and I have vivid recollections of hitting writer's block in an airport in Copenhagen, a train station in Madrid or a hostel in Malta. But when I look back and reread those articles, I can only appreciate how they forced me to alter, then articulate, how I think.
In an era wherein so many people are offloading these skills to artificial intelligence, I am overwhelmingly grateful to have spent such a significant portion of my university career surrounded by people who unequivocally value independent thinking and writing. Reading other columnists’ work and developing my own voice feels especially significant when ChatGPT’s being outsourced for emails and essays and assignments. I can understand the urge to do so, too, just as much as I can understand the urge to throw my computer out the window when the words aren’t working right. But I could never do the former, for the same reason that I would never do the latter. I don’t know if writing truly comes easily to anyone; even after all these years, all I did was learn to love the hard parts too.
Written by: Geetika Mahajan — giamahajan@ucdavis.edu
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