Coming into Cornell as a bright-eyed freshman, I thought I knew how to write. I had written and read my way through life and, for some reason, I was convinced everything I wrote had the finesse of published work. Then I wrote my first college essay, thought to myself, Well, that was easy, and proceeded to rage when it came back with more comments than I’d ever seen scribbled along the margins of a page. How dare this very accomplished graduate student with almost a decade’s worth of higher education, much more than my measly two weeks, tell me my essay wasn’t incredible?
Yeah, I needed to be knocked down a peg … or three.
I spent the next couple of years studying English literature, wading through jungles of words, untangling their meanings by tangling myself in them and then writing my way out of the chaos. My process became a mess of restructuring, deleting and, often, completely rewriting. For the first time in my life, I was letting myself hold hands with difficulty and I was seeing the reward. I stopped seeing writing as a picture-perfect show of perceived skill and allowed it to become proof that I was making an effort to improve, even when it didn’t always work.
Then I joined The Sun and got another thump to the head. Newsflash! Writing an article is nothing like writing an academic essay (so obvious in retrospect). Without prompts, I had to learn to find things to write about, and then I had to take my freshly formed ideas and pitch them to a room full of people instead of workshopping them in the safety of an empty library at night. And actually writing the article? That was the most terrifying thing of all because quite simply. I didn’t know what I was doing. So I learned. I wrote a few bad articles, wrote a few better ones. I never turned in the very first draft.
To this day, every time I sit down to write an article, my first thought is, “How am I going to pull this off?” And that’s a good thing because I don’t want it to be easy. I want to be challenged and I want to let myself struggle. I want to push myself to grow, one draft after another.
When I started at Cornell, I thought writing was easy and that I wanted life to be the same, but during my time here, I learned that the person I want to be lives on the other side of ‘difficult.’ I learned that the fastest road to failure is believing there’s nothing else to improve and that the most valuable thing of all are the people who help make the rough draft that is life a little bit better. They could suggest a better word, point out a contradiction or even rearrange the entire structure. What matters is they care enough to pick up a pen and leave a mark. Writing may be a largely solo endeavor, but the people I met at Cornell taught me that life shouldn’t be.
If you’re a freshman who was just knocked down a peg or three: Keep trying, keep going and never give up after a first draft. Go out and meet people who will change your life and take the time to make an impact in theirs. Life’s a rough draft, after all.
Rafaella Gonzalez is a member of the Class of 2026 in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a staff writer for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at rgonzalez@cornellsun.com.
