NBN alum Sam Niiro once called my writing “masturbatory.” That didn’t feel too great, but considering I spent most of my college career talking about my own poop and vomit, he might have had a point.

The truth is I spent most of college writing about myself. Some articles were about my bodily functions, sure, but the majority of them were thinly-veiled excuses for me to write brash and douchey opinions—what we in the biz call “hot takes.” Hot takes come in all shapes and sizes: Morty should do a Twitter Q&A every quarter; Dillo Day exists more for Mayfest than it does the rest of campus; the One Book One Northwestern should just be the movie Terminator 2 every single year because soon we’ll live in a world where people don’t know who Arnold Schwarzenegger is and that is the saddest effing thing I’ve ever heard; you understand by now. I actually dropped so many hot takes in four years that people around Medill grew prone to calling me The Postman, because of how often I delivered (that’s a lie). Anyway, it’s kind of my thing now, for better or worse. Right, Sam?

Writing hot takes makes me feel good. Powerful. I have the same feeling when I listen to Kanye’s “Famous,” even though I know Taylor Swift and I will never have sex, and I have the same feeling when I throw a rival cyborg into a pit of molten lava, even though that’s literally just the plot of Terminator 2. It’s taking me two separate Terminator 2 references to say that writing down my own thoughts makes me feel like I have agency and autonomy and choice and freedom.

And that freedom feels awesome, at least for a little while. Because before long, as a writer you realize there’s only so much people want to read. There’s only so many voices people want to pay attention to, and when that voice isn’t yours, it hurts a little. We occupy a culture that operates around an ideology of “putting yourself out there,” but when you put yourself out there and people ignore you, that’s the same nowadays as outright rejection. I’d write my hot takes with the eager and childish hope that you, the reader, would always care about them. When you didn’t click, it stung, but that wasn’t your problem. It was just mine.

Northwestern is full of people who create things. We make machines and movies and protests and proposals and stageplays and startups. Whatever we create, we all tell ourselves the same lie: That if we create this thing, and we love it, and we grow it, and we bring it into the world, then that will be enough. It will be enough for that thing to just be, but that’s not true. That’s not why we make things. We don’t make things so they can just be. We create things so they can be looked at and thought about and experienced and shared and engaged with. Creation is about making connections, and when we fail to connect, that failure is so isolating and marginalizing that we end up delegitimizing our own voices. Before long, the gleeful freshman spouting mad hot takes out of his Allison dorm room becomes the desperate writer holed up alone, ranting to nobody … For creators at Northwestern, our biggest problem isn’t resources or exclusivity or opportunity. Our biggest problem is each other.

Shouting into the void doesn’t fill us. What fills us is when someone shouts back. After months and months of dancing alone in the studio or banging away at a keyboard or scribbling down a script, we can experience something that gives us that connection we’ve been searching for: Someone—anyone—tells us to keep going, and that sticks. I still remember Ryan Alva stopping me at a party two years ago to tell me to keep writing about movies. I remember Jasper Scherer sending me pictures last spring of one of my stories on the NBN cover. I remember David Jacoby dapping me up every morning during my time at Grantland. Quiet, spontaneous, unlikely moments. Words over coffee. Greetings on the sidewalk. A random text. These are powerful and meaningful things that carry weight because they’re infused with empowerment. Telling someone their concert was beautiful pushes them to keep playing the cello. Telling someone their program was innovative pushes them to keep coding. Telling someone, hey, you laughed, pushes them to keep being themselves.

I spent my time at Northwestern writing overlong articles about really silly topics, and it was egregious, but I was encouraged because for whatever reason, a few special people told me to keep going. And you should keep going, too. Keep writing. Keep making movies. Keep building. Keep going onstage. You have the potential to be brilliant at what you do, but remember that you also have a fantastic ability to empower others. On a campus so saturated with talent, but also so overcome by insecurity, the ability to inspire our peers is something unique and special and essential. As we strive forward, our words and actions can embolden others to do the same. It’s how we make community. It’s how we connect with others. It’s how we find meaning.

That’s my take, at least.