To put it lightly, graduate school takes your confidence and blows it out of its nose. I’ve realized just how thick-skinned you have to become to make it out of graduate school unscathed. I had a bit of an emotional breakdown this term, because I just realized that my work was no longer just ‘work’, and was beginning to define me too much. Life is strange, because in the week following my emotional breakdown, I was faced with so many strange situations. It was as if the universe took a week off to give me perspective. One of those odd occurrences from this week was that my friend randomly gave me a canvas, a paintbrush and four bottles of acrylic paint. We’ve never spoken of painting before. In fact, I don’t paint. I’ve never painted. I’ve never even held a paintbrush in my adult life. But I’ve started painting, and I love it, not because I feel like I can paint, but because it puts my head and body in a different place. I like the feel of paintbrush on canvas. It’s gentle. It’s quiet. And its reminded me, more than anything, of why I love writing. Writing in graduate school has been so loud and so fierce—the constant tap-tap on the keys in this laptop have begun to sound like a teacher thrashing a ruler against a desk, reminding me of how far behind I am, and where I need to be. But I’ve begun to see (again) the soul of writing in painting. Writing is gentle. It’s a whisper. Every letter a detail in a landscape. I don’t think there’s anything quite as beautiful.