As I sit at my desk every month and begin to compose this column, I imagine that I’m drawing the curtains back on my life and revealing who I am as a person little by little. I’m going to be brutally honest: at first, when I started writing these columns, the thought of putting my innermost thoughts of myself and the world around me into print for strangers’ eyes to read terrified me. I had no clue what I was doing.
The only example of a columnist’s work that I’d had direct exposure to was Carrie Bradshaw’s, from my obsession with the TV show “Sex & the City” in my late adolescence. Now that I think about it, her approach to how she writes her columns and the relationship that she fosters with her readers, through combining her existential thoughts with divulging tidbits of her personal life, directly influenced how I approached writing my columns.
Once I realized that people were responding to my vulnerability in my writing, the trepidation that had once consumed me in regard to allowing others to see aspects of my mind I had deemed undesirable and damaged was eased. This led me to develop the philosophy that I wanted readers to walk away from my columns feeling as though they got a glimpse into my soul, regardless of whether they have read one of my columns or 10.
As cheesy as it sounds, I want readers to feel like they know me to an extent, including providing you all with updates about important things in my life. If the title of this piece wasn’t a dead giveaway, I’ve decided to go back to school to pursue my master’s in publishing and writing at Emerson College.
Now, if any of you are shocked by this news, let me just say that I never imagined I would be writing that sentence a year ago — let alone staring down another two years of reading, homework assignments and papers. But as the saying goes, when you make a plan, God laughs, and that saying definitely rings true in this case.
A year ago, shortly after I had completed my undergraduate degree I wrote a column about learning to embrace the unknown and what the chapter after I graduated would hold for me. For an extremely Type A individual such as myself, that is much easier said than done. I’m sure anyone who read the column at the time thought that I was a young woman who had a good head on her shoulders, but I wrote the column as a way of telling myself words that I desperately needed to hear but couldn’t internalize to save my life.
When I graduated, I was beyond burned out from school, which I didn’t think was even possible for a person who innately thrived in an academic environment as much as I did. But completing a double major in addition to a 123-page thesis did the trick in that regard. If you had asked me then, the only way that I would ever return to a classroom setting would have been with a lot of kicking and screaming.
However, I didn’t have a lot of job prospects and was having daily breakdowns whenever I militantly logged onto LinkedIn to apply for jobs and saw my classmates posting about jobs that they had gotten.
While a small part of me was genuinely happy for them, especially with the job market being what it is, the bigger part of me was still extremely bitter. I have prided myself on the fact that I have always been a bookworm, motivated and done well in school, but upon graduating and being turned down for jobs, it felt like I had failed in some way because I had yet to reach that culmination point.
The part that mortally wounded me more than anything was the fact that I was lost. I had lost perspective somehow along the way as to what type of career I would want — what type of career would fulfill me.
It took me a few months of obtaining freelance writing jobs to gain that perspective back. It became clear that in order to get my foot in the door in the book publishing industry, I either needed to have connections in the industry (which I did not have) or pursue a program that specializes in publishing in hopes of forming those connections.
Ironically, I had heard about the publishing and writing program at Emerson from a friend of mine at UMass, who also attended the program. In the back of my mind, I had the notion that I would give myself a year and see what connections I could make on my own before venturing down that route.
Fast forward to January of this year, when I made the decision to apply for the program. It was the only program I applied for because it was the only program I was interested in. By all accounts, it was the riskiest decision I have ever made because it was the only time that I didn’t have a back-up plan. My philosophy was simple though: if it was meant to be, it would be. If it didn’t, I’d figure out an alternative plan.
Fortunately, it was meant to be. I made the decision to get a jump-start on the program by taking a class this summer, so by the time you all read this I’ll be knee-deep in reading for my Publishing Law class. But overall, I’m more excited than anything to go back.
I’ve made the joke, on several occasions, that my relationship with academia is one of my longest standing relationships. And in a weird way, it does feel like I’m returning home.
Joanna Buoniconti is a freelance writer and an editorial intern at INCLUDAS Publishing. She can be reached at columnist@gazettenet.com.