Ever since I finished my thesis, whenever I talk to people about it, I’ve been joking half-jokingly that I’ll never write again. “Surely you’ll keep writing,” people will say. Or they’ll ask questions like, “Do you really think you’ll never write again?” or, “Why do you think you’ll never write again?” or, “Jake, why are you flinging your laptop into the turbid waters of the mighty Mississippi River? Is it because you intend to stop writing forever?”

I’m not serious, of course; I know I’ll keep writing. I can’t help myself, and I’m not really much good anything else (besides crossword puzzles, of course). But I will say that I’m ready to be done with the first-person voice for a while, and with the memoir. I’ve written a thick slice of unabashedly personal history in order to obtain a graduate degree, which is already kind of strange when I stop to think about it—which I’ve been doing a lot lately.

So I’m ready to be done casting back into the past, to finish scrutinizing and documenting an era that was hard enough the first time around. It’s been difficult, draining, depressing work to spend three years (re-)inhabiting what was arguably the worst year of my life. So I’m ready to be done with that. I’m ready to be done with reflection, and retrospect, now that they’ve served their purpose; I’m ready to be done with nostalgia, something that, I’ve recently discovered, isn’t actually that up to which it’s cracked.

Instead, I’m ready to consider the argumentative essay, the lyrical essay, the prose poem, literary journalism, and criticism. I’m ready to write in the second- and third-person voice, in the present and future tenses. Now that I’ve spent three years and a couple hundred pages dispatching a weird chunk of my own history, I’m ready to look outward, to draw my gaze up from my navel. The past may not be done with me, but I’m done with the past. (For now.)