The idea of taking the Capstone class scared me at first. Well, that sounds a bit dramatic. I was taking it with T, my favorite writing teacher, and saw some familiar faces when I walked in, which made me feel a little better. But still. The idea of devoting an entire semester to a single project was incredibly overwhelming; I even had this problem with my Gateway project, and now I was expected to take on something even BIGGER. What if I got bored of it? What if I mess it up and have to start over? What if it isn’t good enough?
When we first starting brainstorming ideas and pitching to our classmates, I became even more anxious. So many of my peers were thinking about doing scientific studies, or research papers, or app design. I remember thinking: is this what my project has to be like? A statistical analysis? A numbers game? I had no idea how to do any of those things, and none of those ideas sounded appealing to me. I became really worried, but tried to push those anxieties away so I could start brainstorming something that I was really passionate about. I decided that passion was storytelling. The semester before this one, I had taken a class that taught me how to write short fiction, and the product of that class was an eighty-five page short story collection that I was, and still am, incredibly proud of. I wanted to do something similar to that in this project, but wasn’t sure what that meant.
After a few weeks of thinking, I decided to do a podcast, a la The Moth Radio Hour. I loved the idea of combining writing short fiction with reading it out loud. I went back and forth trying to decide what I would actually be reading: should it be short stories that I already wrote? New ones? Shorter ones? Longer ones? I had no idea. The one thing I was certain about, though, was the podcast’s theme: growing up and the loss of childhood innocence, inspired by the weird and uncertain times I’m experiencing in transitioning to a post-college life. I settled on writing five original stories about growing up, making each story its own episode, and, voila, a podcast about growing up.
Here is where I started running into some issues. I felt a strong disconnect between the stories and the audio: something just didn’t feel right. Something felt wrong. My concerns were echoed in my workshop session, where my peers read copies of my stories and told me a more physical format would suit the project better. The audio idea wasn’t necessarily taking anything away from the project, but it wasn’t adding anything, either. And then, it dawned on me: why was I making everything so overly complicated? If I loved writing that short story collection last semester, why don’t I just do it again? So, that’s what I did, and I even took it a step further.
My capstone project, Growing Pains, is a digital eBook of flash fiction, with a cover page, table of contents and everything. It’s shorter than my original short story collection and very different: I chose flash fiction as a fun experiment to challenge myself and see if I could do the same things I do in my longer fiction with length constraints.
I’ve learned a lot throughout this process. One of these lessons is something I try and tell myself every day: stop comparing yourself to other people, and stop telling yourself that your ideas are inferior. Do what makes you happy. In other words, you do you! Don’t try and overcomplicate your project or your idea to fit into what you think your project should be. I’m so happy with my end product, all because I came to this realization, let everything go, and trusted myself to make something that I could be proud of. This process was also extremely cathartic for me. Being able to write about something that scares me pushes me to look past these fears and turn my anxiety into something beautiful: writing. I’m so proud of this project; I feel complete. Even writing about it makes me smile.