u/Affectionate_Hawk654

I thought it was pretty normal to start a two-year program without a set-in-stone idea for my final manuscript/thesis, but some people in my cohort seemed surprised and concerned by my lack of a first draft, much less my lack of an outline. I am transitioning out of bartending and into academia, and have mostly written flash fiction/short stories throughout my time behind the bar. I was awarded a fellowship, which is super flattering and helps a lot financially, but classes start next week and I'm starting to freak out because I'm still unsure what I want to write. Am I being an idiot? Please be brutally honest -- and if you started your MFA without a clue about what you were going to write, how did you fare? Thanks in advance!

I'm writing this to you from the two-bed two-bath ranch-style home I share with my boyfriend and our dog, just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, at 11:45 P.M. on a Wednesday night. A few minutes ago, the last scenes of Lena Dunham's Girls played in my basement, as I drank a double-tequila soda with lime and wept into the kitschy fur blanket that Grandma gifted all twelve grandkids two Christmases ago. After giving the first three seasons of Girls an enthusiastic watch at 19, and again at 20 (though never circling back around to finish the series), I decided to watch Girls in its entirety after listening to Famesick a few months ago -- which I consumed during my commute in and out of the city, early-morning inventory shifts at my day job as a bartender, last-minute grocery store trips on $6 Sushi Wednesdays, and sometimes doing chores late at night, because dusting can be somewhat aesthetic by candlelight.

As such, I have spent several nights over the last eight weeks watching Girls in my spare time, which is once the house is settled and tucked in for bed, the dog and my partner both conked out for the night, my phone silent of notifications. I realized early on in the journey that the reason I had never fully fallen head-over-heels for this series is because I had watched it too young. At 23, standing on the precipice of 24, it came together and played out in a blinding flash of clarity. Any true fan of any good art knows that delicious, almost dangerous feeling of knowing that something is becoming Your Favorite Thing right before your eyes. It tears a rift in the universe and points right at you. Girls found me clawing at the edges of the most tumultuous two years of my life and cradled me there, allowed me to pull out of the fear of not knowing who I'm going to be yet, showed me it was okay and normal. And it highlighted the things I have been trying to avoid: my university friend group has fallen apart. I'm becoming a real adult. Everything feels possible, and nothing has turned out like I thought it would. I want to be a writer, yet I am still too afraid to put my government name on anything I believe in, so I have turned to Reddit instead of Substack, because it's where I feel like I can get away with creative nonfiction/autofiction/whateveryouwannacallit without facing the repercussions of acknowledging that my life is influenced and made richer by the people around me, ones who may not want to be named on the Internet just because they make me more authentic. My friends, exes, professors, bosses -- they're not my intellectual property. When I think about writing honestly, my first thought is never embarrassment. I can handle a little public humiliation. I am always petrified that someone I love/have loved will be hurt because I wanted to tell a story. Especially the true stories.

So, after weeks of following this subreddit just because I wanted to lurk and hate on Fran vicariously, wanted to unpack the twisted mystery of "American Bitch," wanted to find the best sites to take a Which "Girl" Are You? quiz on, I have decided to pitch my essay into the void, anonymously, with cowardice and gratitude. This morning, my self-proclaimed "Bible-thumpin', God-fearin'" mother called me because she's been worried. We spent this past weekend in New York City together and I spent half the time adjusting my clothes, spiraling over the weight I've gained post-grad, about the dynamics that have been changing around me and the friendships I clung to like a lifeline, which all had fallen into some category of disarray not because we all wanted them to, not even because it had been a long time coming, but because we are finally growing up and it's fucking hard. I've been accepted into an MFA program in the city on full scholarship. I am going to get paid to write, which feels like something my six-year-old self would keel over upon hearing out of sheer disbelief. I have a love in my life that makes me strong and safe, that has sustained years of long distance, loss, and renewal. I have been diagnosed with PMDD and bipolar disorder, and the action of typing that fact out makes my insides curdle with fear of not wanting to victimize myself. Because when my mother called this morning, she confided in me that she has always known that Satan is inside of me -- my depressive tendencies, my insecurities -- she believes they are the Devil himself working to take over my mind like kudzu, and while I have staved him off for years, I am finally weak enough to give in. She said this with the conviction of a street preacher; we were never a fire-and-brimstone type family, even when I stepped away from the church at fifteen and donated the custom bracelet that my friend Sarah Cate's mom watched me get after summer camp, at a street market, when I visited them in New Orleans. I don't remember the date I had branded onto it, sometime in July, maybe August -- the ironworker pressed the numbers into a small metal band before looping the leather through and fastening it on my wrist -- the month, day, and year that I accepted Jesus Christ, during a summer camp entering seventh grade, at the top of a mountain in the rural South. No toothpaste, deodorant, or soap had been allowed, so that the first shower upon returning to "camp" (the dorms of a college campus, empty for the summer) would feel like our sins washing away from us. As a thirteen-year-old Hannah (tired, emotional, and hungry for a Hobo Potato) my hand shot up as soon as the camp counselor asked who wanted to be free from the weight they'd been carrying and give themselves over to Jesus. Up until that night, I had been firmly on the fence, which seemed to intrigue the girls in my cabin in a way that made me feel mysterious and alluring. When Sarah Cate and I snuck out of our tent around midnight to find a good place to use the bathroom in the woods, she laughed. It's your first piss as a Christian! The words came out in that honeyed Louisiana drawl of hers. I wanted to be part of the club. For a few years, I really tried. But it ultimately wasn't for me, and when I broke away from homeschool and private, Christian education to go to public high school as a freshman, I left my first holy piss and the leather bracelet behind.

So, yeah. Hearing my mother, for all her wonders and her faults, say that I have been possessed by the Devil because I can't walk a few blocks without frantically checking myself in the mirror, getting irritable in one-hundred-degree weather, loathing myself for putting on more than a few pounds and refusing to write throughout the one summer I have left before writing is my full-time job, to have her fully convinced that Satan is the reason I'm this way and that I am simply unwilling to fix it, to repent -- it cut deep. I immediately texted the almost-dead group chat of my closest friends in the world and knew that, no matter how hard they tried to comfort me from afar, and without stepping on the tripwires of our various conflicting energies and levels of interconnectedness or personal beef, nothing was the same anymore. University is over. We're all trying to live our lives and hope that whoever puts up with our annoying tendencies and shifting life goals cares enough to keep conversation and visits going over thousands of miles, spending hundreds of hours and dollars on investing in each other. That shit takes work. So does trying to maintain a relationship with a mother whose belief system is completely different from my own, whose trauma has taken the shape of archaic preaching, whose words hurt me even when they are said out of a desperate, pleading love, because she doesn't want to see me suffer anymore. By the end of season six, Girls is about two things: letting go of your college friends, and forgiving your mom.

I want to be a writer who can elaborate on this experience without feeling guilty, or overly dramatic. I want to be like Lena Dunham, and be able to take any criticism or drama or burning bridges on the chin and let it all drip. I don't know if I'm there yet. But after today, and after this finale, I feel like I'm finally ready to start. I find comfort in the fact that Girls puts a spotlight on the Devil (or however you personally interpret the feeling of being a woman in your twenties) and sets him free.