I wrote a poem once titled “The Modern Prometheus,” one that had to do with Victor Frankenstein and the curse of ambition. I don’t mean for it to be as dramatic as it sounds — even though I tend to play into the tortured genius angle too much sometimes. Victor and I share a bad habit: we can’t stop creating things that destroy our sleep schedules. While Victor made a monster, I make Word documents. His creation terrorized villages; mine terrorizes Google Docs with track changes and coffee stains.
But beneath the melodrama of lightning bolts and laboratory tables, I get him: the obsessive note-taking, the way that guilt can feel productive and the temptation to tinker with something until it’s no longer yours and it’s gone from its original conception.
When I first read Frankenstein, I thought that Victor’s tragedy was that he played god. But reading it again, I realized that it was because he couldn’t bear the responsibility of what he had made. I’ve spent enough time rereading my drafts to know what it feels like to be horrified by your own work. There’s always that one paragraph that makes me go, oh god, who let me write that?
I think that Victor had the perfect makings of a burned-out honors student — the kind who “forgets to eat” because he’s too busy chasing enlightenment through a stack of primary sources. If he were alive today, he’d have a caffeine addiction, a teaching assistant position and an unfinished thesis titled “On the Nature of Creation and the Consequences of the Pursuit of Knowledge (Working Draft).”
I’d probably be in the next carrel over, doing the exact same thing. I’ve been guilty, more than once, of trying to play god with my own work. I’ll resurrect a sentence that should’ve stayed dead or sew together the best parts of ten drafts and still hate the way that it looks. Like Victor, I expect my creations to thank me, but they just stare back ugly and incomplete — and I recoil like he did.
Victor never realized that his monster wasn’t the problem — it was his own fear of imperfection. I do the same thing when I let an unfinished Google Doc sit in my Drive like a creature banished to the Arctic. I tell myself I’ll return to it when I’m “ready,” and I never am.
But the thing about being overbearing is that it’s hard to stop. I’ve written papers that read like confessions, journal entries that sound like research abstracts and discussion posts that might as well be eulogies for my sanity.
And maybe that’s why Victor resonates with me so much: he’s the blueprint for every overthinker who has ever tried to build something meaningful and ended up accidentally creating a mess. He wanted to create life and I just want to make something that feels alive. He was consumed by guilt and I’m consumed by self-editing.
So Victor and I are one and the same, except I’m hunched over my laptop instead of a laboratory table, lit by the blue glow of Google Docs instead of lightning. My monster doesn’t roam mountains, but it lives in my drafts folder, waiting for me to be brave enough to finish it. Maybe one day I’ll build something that I’m not afraid of.
In the end, the truth is that I’ll never stop chasing that spark, hat jolt of life that comes when a sentence finally lands or an idea finally breathes. And that is what makes me different from Victor Frankenstein. He ran from his creation and I’ll run towards mine, even if it keeps me up all night. Because in my chaos and caffeine, I’m still alive enough to make something new.
Kaylee Nguyen is a sophomore studying Medicine, Science, and the Humanities and Writing Seminars from Pensacola, Fla. She is a News and Features Editor for The News-Letter.