imaginary turf battles

So we had to turn in our first creative writing pieces tonight by midnight (via email to everyone in the class). Although it would take a lot of ego-stroking by classmates for me to try putting it up in this space, I'm still happy with how it turned out. It seems to me that a lot of what is worth working on in the class is balancing the need to create a voice/explain my subject position while at the same time avoiding overpersonalization of the type that I look back and see consistently crop up in my other writing. Although I'm sure all of my fragile, amateur impressions of nonfiction will be reshaped and realigned as of the first class meeting, it seems to me that the point of public writing is to, without obscuring the primacy of one's perceptions, brush the dirt off a little shard of truth. And let's be honest: most of the shards I find and dust off are not going to be original, brilliant discoveries. And that's fine. Right?

Well, let's just say that I read through the other submissions from the class as soon as I sent mine in. In general, the quality of the writing only made me more excited for the class--both the ideas and the syntax/diction/voice were generally exciting and good. Unfortunately, at one point, someone else's essay ended up in territory that was surprisingly close to some ideas covered in mine. My first instinct was to bristle, even though most of her writing was about something else entirely; immediately afterwards, I tried to rationalize how the two ideas were actually distinct and different and nobody would even notice any similarity. Then I got embarrassed about the whole emotional upheaval and closed the document. Looking back on it now with a couple hours' perspective, that was embarrassing. If, as I suggest above, the point of my writing is to get at some kind of truth, it is a good sign that the two ideas looked like each other. It lends a reassurance to my questions about the veracity of my thoughts. Right?

I just don't understand why it was so difficult (painstaking, even) to convince myself of this. Did my education really place so much emphasis on creativity/uniqueness that to explore, entirely by coincidence, the same territory as a classmate and peer so scary? I'm not sure; my sin may just be too much pride in my intellectual production when, in reality, I'm no better off (and often worse off) than the people around me. More positively, maybe I just set the bar so high for myself that I wanted writing I felt good about but also writing that other people felt good about. I see this strong need for validation cropping up in other areas of my life, so it really shouldn't come as a shock that I treat my writing with a defensiveness most reserve for politics. Whatever the cause is, though, I can't help but feel like it was nurtured by years spent in an academic culture that I already have some serious beef with, but which I'm paying for the privilege to participate in. Anyone's ethical priorities can be screwed around with a big enough lever, and for me it seems like $15000 in debt and even larger sums of my parents' money provides enough guilt to get full-on buy-in.