A Girl Obsessed

Here, I will aim to map out the constellation pattern of my lifelong obsessions, from two week phases to five year devotion. 

In case you aren't related to me or have been friends with me for any year, one fact of my personality is that I (very easily) get obsessed with stuff. And not, like, good for me stuff, like doing math equations or running or cooking kale into my every meal. I get obsessed with stuff that sucks my soul and mind into a different world and pushes me inside my inner world - television, books, music and movies. Throughout the entire scope of my adolescence and pushing into my adulthood, I cannot help but allow my life to be shaped by the different kinds of media I encounter.

I can't say why this all began or how, just that by my nature I am an obsessive person, prone to addiction. In addition to books and movies, I get a little bit obsessed with people: friends, my family. (Concurrently, I get un-obsessed with people and push them away from me. It's a push-and-pull life and something I always try to overcome.)

I used to re-read books a lot. Judy Blume's Just As Long As We're Together was one of my frequent re-reads, and Blubber as well. You could call me a Babysitter's Club fiend, if you wanted. And though I loved Harry Potter, it wasn't until seventh grade that my love for it merged into a lifestyle - no, my first obsession is quite possibly the strangest: the 2005 movie musical Rent.

Much of this obsession was fueled by a new friend, with whom I bonded over and loved Rent with. I spent all my free time and much of my homework time on my family's desktop, on Photobucket, Xanga, and YouTube, anything and everything connecting me to this musical that had captured my heart. Luckily for me and my parents, much of the content went right over my dumb little head. I was far too emotionally immature to understand the nuances of the plot, its socioeconomic commentary and especially its keen awareness of gender fluidity.

Ultimately, what grabbed me and propelled me into grandiose obsession (I had a literal binder, like, a hardcopy thing where I stored my Rent stuff, that I printed off the computer, because it was 2006) was its soundtrack, first of all, which is amazing, and second of all, its portrayal of all the different kinds of relationships. Rent presented me with an idea of the world that was so far different from my white Catholic sphere that it allowed me to become far more accepting later in life, of transgendered individuals, of addictions, of the spectrum of sexuality. It was all I talked about my entire eleventh year, all I listened to, all I ever wanted to watch.

After Rent and a little during, I entered my "emo phase" where I pretended I was a certain thing because of the music I liked: Panic! At the Disco, Jack's Mannequin and Fall Out Boy, and later Boys Like Girls and All Time Low. This weird little phase took me further into adolescence, from my round middle school days into my high school life, and the music I listened to would continue to affect how I saw myself, others, and the world until I would graduate high school.

Here is where I have to become grudgingly honest and expose myself to the entire Internet: I love Twilight and I feel no shame. It all started during eighth grade. My grade school best friend and I had fought horribly the year before and spent much of the year cold shouldered and then just when we made up, she moved two hours south. Eighth grade presented me with a different group of friends than I'd had the last few years and I felt at times very uncomfortable in my quiet, scholarly skin, knowing that in just a few months we would all be parting ways as I would be attending a private high school and they would carry into public.

I think I felt alone and uncomfortable with my tendency towards introversion. I was happy, and having fun, but at times very insecure. And all this uncertainty and insecurity and instability and coming change led me straight into the very white arms of the Twilight Saga.

It all began in the fall of 2007. I was preparing to take my entrance exam at Mags and knew I'd finish the sections long before time was up (I always did and always do) and brought a random book from my stack from the library with me to keep me entertained while I waited. That book was Twilight, the first one, and I was so engrossed that I refused to stop reading until I finished, far past my arbitrary bed time, heart pounding in my little twin bed in my adolescent bedroom.

Honestly, it stole my life for awhile. It was all I thought about, talked about; I powered through the sequels. Distinctly, I recall sitting on our old couch in our living room, crying as Edward left Bella in New Moon, trying to hide the tears from my mom, my brother, my dog. After I finished the books, I held them hostage from the library until my parents gave in and bought me the box set for Christmas. I cried. I read fanfiction, wrote fanfiction, made Edward and Bella Sims and thought all the time of these characters and their world.

I don't know what it was about the Twilight saga that enraptured me so - though I continue to look on it fondly, I recognize its inherent problems narratively, politically, economically. I think it was the blandness of it. Bella is a normal, pedestrian girl. She wears normal clothes, has normal hair, has a painfully boring divorced parents backstory. There is nothing extraordinary about her and I think it was that that appealed to me, then, that she, like me, was a normal girl. As an adult, I realize the flaws in that, in my constant desire to be unique and ethereal when at my heart I am a basically a carbon copy of a million other middle class white girls.

That there would also be a movie franchise fueled my devotion. I joined IMDb and participated in many a forum. This was 2008, the early days of fandom, before devoted fans found purchase on Tumblr. That fall, my brother, Jack, closest in age to me and my companion, left for college and I started high school, without any of the friends I'd forged that last year of middle school, at an all girls Catholic institution.

In the liminal space of that summer, when I was "scene" and on MySpace and obsessed with Disney and alternative music and still Twilight, always Twilight, I used Facebook to meet girl from my high school. Because of Facebook, Twilight and awkward adolescent determination to know at least one person not from St. Joe's, I met one of my to this day best friends, Grace. It would not be the first time in my life that one of my obsessions would lead me to lifelong friendship.

Twilight kept me warm until my junior year of high school, when I'd tired of the characters and all of the nonsense of the then-franchise. Instead, I joined Tumblr and spent much of October and November obsessed with Taylor Swift and her Speak Now album, which had just been released. Eclipsing Taylor, though, that November, was Glee.

I've written about Glee before. The eighth episode of the show's sophomore season, "Furt," made me fall head over heels in love with the show. When I learned that other people were crazy about Glee like I was - that they loved Finn and Rachel like I did - I felt like I had finally found a niche. No one in my real life liked Glee the way I did, no one thought about it like me; it wasn't important to anyone else. I couldn't talk about it with them, about this show that opened up my hard emotional self and cracked it, alerting me to things I saw in the characters that I saw in myself.

Glee was the first time I watched a television show and found characters like me, whose desperation to have love and respect made them selfish and mean. But besides what the show mirrored to me, I just loved it. I loved the stupid music, the over-the-top storylines, the conveyor belt of romance. The show became like a Punnett Square of relationships, so unlike my own droll life that I was ensconced. And, like Twilight, Glee came into my life when I was on the precipice of change.

Junior year, my body was changing. The weight I'd put on the year came off a little, I got into yoga, my figure shone through layers of baby fat. My mom was back from her year-long assignment but things at home were perhaps more unstable than the year before. I was making new friends from different groups, learned how to drive, dyed my hair. I started wearing my glasses every day. Everything shifted as I came into who I would be as an adult, but Glee gave me the stability I needed, an outlet for all this change to be funneled into so I wouldn't have to deal with it myself.

Every Tuesday at 9 in the evening, I had something to watch. When my dad had his heart attack, it was Glee that I turned to, unable to put into words besides a late night phone call to my best friend about how it felt, how scary, and absolutely avoided the topic with my mom and my brothers. When his life was saved, when I had to return home, I watched Glee on the little television in my room in relief. Things had shifted, absolutely, but I still had this thing - this show, this fandom - that remained.

In 2012, I graduated and began college and had a horrible time of it. The previous fall, Glee had brought Rachel into my life. The summer before college, we Skyped every single night, basically, and in those early winter days, where I found myself alone and friendless at BGSU, we continued this tradition, talking about Cory and Lea Michele and Finn and Rachel and writing and all the things we loved, then. An interview with Cory on Ellen DeGeneres brought Shanna into our circle. I didn't know then how important that night was, but it became clear as we exchanged Facebook information, cell phone numbers, emails, even addresses for Christmas cards that these were not Just Internet Friends, these were Real Life Friends.

Without them, I honestly wouldn't have made it through late 2012 and early 2013. I was lonely and sad and letting myself slip into dangerous introversion. But we chatted on Skype every single day all day. I would log on at three in the afternoon and we would chat through dinner, through homework, through writing and through bed time, sometimes past two in the morning if I had a late class. We laughed and I felt better, there, laughing in my little bedroom in small town Ohio than I had going out with the girls on my floor who had abandoned me.

Through my Glee phase, which spanned from 2010-2013, I spent two weeks obsessed with The Hunger Games, another few months dedicated to Doctor Who, in January of 2013 I discovered BBC's The Hour, which remains in my top five favorite shows. It was during this time that I found Joni, whose music has inspired a lifelong obsession. Hers is music I will never truly tire of, will never abandon like I have other things I have loved and am now forgetting.

All good things come to an end. I became a feminist and could no longer love Twilight limitlessly. I had to add provisions to my enjoyment of the franchise: I like Twilight, but Edward is abusive; I like Twilight, but Bella is not a character, but a shade. Glee ended when Cory died in the middle of July 2013. It came screeching to a halt, no preparation, no questions asked. Cory died and that same morning I deleted every single Glee song from my iTunes library. Earlier that summer, I had deleted all the episodes I'd downloaded. I went to the gym and ran out my sadness, deleted the Twitter app and took a break from the Internet and went on vacation with Grace to New Jersey and New York.

In NYC the day before my 19th birthday, I met Shanna for the first time in person. I had been scared our friendship would change after Cory passed away, that not having the common thread of Glee, we would shatter and unravel. I feared our triad would break off and I desperately avoided addressing it when we did Skype.

Now I find myself mapping this lovely friendship that Glee gave me since it's the most important thing beside all the self-confidence, the writing ability, the outlet for all my grief and pent up emotions. After Glee, there was nothing. A little Fringe, a little Dawson's Creek; every television show I watch, I obsess over for a bit and move on, same with books. My reactions to the things I loved became somewhat mainstream. I liked a band, I recommended it and moved on. Or, I liked a television show and I reblogged a picture of it onto my blog.

And then I moved to England and lost the time to watch new shows, spending the time I had to watch Netflix rewatching old shows, Parks and Recreation, The Mindy Project, Gilmore Girls. What can I say - I love a good female-led ensemble comedy. But then the first semester passed and half the second and before I knew it I was facing three long weeks of spring break and only one set in stone travel plan, stuck on campus while all my friends traveled with each other and their families.

Then, The X-Files revival was announced. I'd watched the first two seasons of the show sometime in the midst of my Glee and post-Glee life but hadn't been too committed to finishing it for some reason. It was an old, long show and I had all the time in the world since it wouldn't be returning - and then suddenly, it was, and my desire to finish it spiked. For two weeks straight, I marathon watched, obsessed with every detail, every storyline, every interaction between Mulder and Scully.

Of course, as with all things, it comes when I am facing yet another change in my life - the end of my year abroad and my final year of university. I can't talk about it or I'll cry. But it's coming and I'm not surprised at all that I find myself obsessed with this crazy 90's show about aliens. It makes me happy. When I watched, it made me laugh and cry and talk aloud to myself. It gave me something to do when I was bored and verging on lonely, gave me a new thing to love and think about on the elliptical at the gym. Though my relationship with Shanna and Rachel has only gotten stronger since Cory's death (we've managed to meet three times since and are planning our fourth for this summer) and even better since I've been gone, somehow, The X-Files is another thing we all have in common that reminds us of the childlike way we loved Glee in the winter of 2013.

All these are things that are a part of me. The things I love make me me, I am what I watch, what I read, what I listen to. I am but a product of what and who I love. Without Glee, I would never have been so informed and would be years behind where I am now when it comes to feminism. Without Rent, I would have spent my adolescence confused as sexuality entered our lives. Without Twilight, I wouldn't have met my first high school friend, wouldn't have had that familiarity that I so desperately needed and held onto for four years, as rocky as they were. My reaction to change and trauma and sadness might be strange, but it lightens things for me, helps the weight of all my worry and anxiety off my shoulders. I would far rather be anxious about the alien conspiracy in the world of The X-Files than how I'm going to cope saying goodbye to Keele.

I would rather be what I love than who loves me.

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March On

Oftentimes, my weeks here are so filled - with homework, classes, socializing, reading, sleeping - that I'm not able to reflect as much as I'd like. February was a cold gray blip in time and for the first time since arriving here, I didn't leave this area once. I forget that I'm here, in England, away from home, that I do not go to Keele, that these humans I've befriended will be departing from me too soon. Maybe I'll be departing from them, since I'm leaving first. Ninety-three days feels like nothing and yet June feels so very far from here, where I am lying in the dark, putting off going to sleep of all things.

Today was the first day in a few weeks where I felt abundantly homesick. Here, I always am missing home, but not in an all day every day kind of thing, but today it resurfaced and I wanted to see my mom and dad and siblings and niece and nephews and my dog and my house. I want to take the people I have there and bring them here, wish I could double and be in two places at once.

England is a strange, funny place. I find something new to like every day and is blooming as spring comes. So thankful I am for having winter here, where it is mild and windy and wet instead of snowy and freezing. A few weeks ago I went on a walk around our campus because I had never really seen it since the fall was odd and the winter was cold. I feel like I wasn't here at all last semester.


Here, the clock changes later and Mother's Day is next weekend. The water is different and the sun is a stranger and flowers are sprouting everywhere. I can hear people all day in their rooms, singing and laughing and talking and wonder if they can hear me, too. My sense of style is stalling in the year I was born and there are less days until my birthday than I have been in England. I miss writing and have forgotten its simple pleasures and wish someone would lend me their characters so I could reignite that passion.

Already, I have read twenty books and I am writing this so I can sleep tonight. I am learning things about myself because I am a living cliché. I wonder what made me want to come here and am ever grateful for the perseverance that has brought me here, made me stay when it wasn't what I expected, that made me fall in love with this funny little place. I absolutely hate goodbyes but I love hello agains even more, and know now in March that I will be using that love to power through my goodbyes.

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negotiating thankfulness

The Great Gatsby used to be my favorite book and I wanted to grow into a lawyer, a pharmacist, a writer. We never told each other we'd be friends forever, but it was there, threaded into plans for the future: when I get married, you guys are going to be my bridesmaids, or, when huddled together on a double bed after college's first semester, we promised when we live in New York, come visit, we'll have an apartment and there will always be room for you on our couch. When I publish my first book, you can share my wealth, sleep in my basement, a space for you always in my life, no matter where we are or what you do.

Last Thanksgiving I counted what I was thankful for on one hand: thumb, my family, index finger, my friends who'd reminded me that there was something in me to love and miss, middle finger, my dog, ring finger, the blessings that my parents have given me, a home to live in, an education to acquire, and on my pinky finger, I counted the blessing of living in a country where I can more or less live freely. This year, I feel like even if I had ten hands, I still wouldn't be able to commodify my thankfulness.

I have friends like family from high school and a family that loves like friends. A year ago, I was a shelled out version of myself, hollow bones, now I feel my roots spreading much more certainly everywhere I go. There is no way for me to explain how I got myself out of my sadness. I spent all of my time alone on my computer, curled on my bed, facilitating between my television, Netflix and music every weekend. Homework somehow got done in the spaces between.

I had my anchors, though. My mom, always, my friends when they could, new friends on the Internet who, after daily Skype chats, became best friends and I could talk about this forever and ever, every single day, but that would be redundant. I am thankful for these people who supported me when I was impossible to support, feeling bodiless and loose, who helped purport me to where I am now, stronger, confident again, positive.

Everything changes and everyone changes but most things inexplicably stay the same. I still love The Great Gatsby but I've moved on and I want to go to graduate school and work in publishing and work with people every day, to make something worthwhile to send back to the universe to thank it for these countless blessings it has bestowed on me every day. Though last year was one of the most challenging experiences of my life so far, I am forever grateful for the obstacles laid in my path, for they have taught me how to orient myself, to see the other side of a problem, the positive side, the moss that grows on the edge of the boulders that demonstrates that life can grow from obstacles.

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if the earth could

In an effort to feel closer to you after you died,

we started going to mass,

dipped our fingers in holy water,

pressed our palms together

as we recited the Lord’s prayer until

the words lost all their meaning. This

is how you give a word meaning:

you ascribe a memory to it,

like, James Joyce will always be a porch,

my mouth fumbling over

bourgeois

and your patience manifest there.

If grief were a dichotomy it would be

remembering and forgetting,

like, the sight of your hands clasped in your coffin

reminisces of them moving always,

the effect of the illness that did not consume you

you were not your illness you never will be.

When we remember we remember your kindness,

your capacity to love outside yourself how

you loved

every person you met,

even those you hadn’t yet met and

never would.

If the world could feel

it would have felt your passing like the aftershocks

of an earthquake,

unlike the raw ripe absence of someone gone too soon.

You ended premature still full developed

a peach off the tree the day before it would reach perfection.

This is where we remember:

something you would have said, something you would have liked someone

you would have loved to meet. A place you loved.

Anecdotes: remember when—? Here you are

now, encapsulated in the written word.

If the earth could feel, it

would ache in the presence of your absence, dully,

the way the body remembers a touch.

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being a person is more than being a number

Growing up in the late 90s/early 2000s, my childhood was a mixed bag of the reticent "kids can eat sugar" era and the "giving sugar to kids is a gateway to future health/eating problems". Really, what I'm trying to say, is that when I was a kid, my parents let me drink pop sometimes. And by pop sometimes, I mean diet pop, and sometimes my dad would sneak me regular pop when my mom wasn't home. I used to love watching the carbonation - the way that bubbles would jump along the surface, the way fizz would bubble to the top of the cup and sink down.

The point isn't really my weird love for pop and carbonation (that carries on today with a gross Diet Coke addiction), but that what I was drinking was diet pop and I was deemed an overweight child. My cousin who is the same age as me and markedly thinner was exactly the opposite - she was forced to drink regular pop and longed for the diet she was banned from.

I was in the second grade the first time I really remember becoming aware of my body and I was in the fourth grade the first time I remember feeling ashamed of my body.

We were in the doctor's office, my mom and I, and I was sitting at that token kid's table that must be on the checklist for every pediatrician's office. Disney-themed coloring books? Check. Small table with mismatched crayons and markers haphazardly tossed in a tupperware box? Check. I wanted to shrink into myself as my doctor asked my mom if our family had any previous history of being overweight and I tried to focus on the crumbling indigo of the worn Crayola marker I was coloring with instead of her response.

I was always thin as a child and growing up, but my mother, she was just like Mary Gael.

If I could, I would go back in time to this moment, pat my nine-year-old self on the back, tell her, you will be so much more than your body. It wasn't a criticism of me, my mom bringing me to this doctor's appointment that changed my relationship to food, but out of concern for my health. This was an era when child obesity was just emerging as a serious problem in America and I think my mom was scared of me developing diabetes.

I started wearing a bra that year. And I was somewhat active. That fall, I played volleyball and that winter, I played basketball. In the fifth grade at my Catholic elementary school, we began to wear token plaid skirts and these super cool polo shirts with a band around the bottom - you know, so you didn't have to look completely lame and tuck your shirt in like all the boys. I didn't wear my bra that year and pretended I didn't feel really weird when we changed for gym in the dark classroom. In the spring, I developed a virus that severely limited my appetite and I remember tucking a small piece of pride in my pocket when the number on the scale at the doctor's was noticeably smaller than it had been beforehand.

No one ever told me it was okay to look the way I did, that worth was not equivalent to the number on the scale. No one teased me on the playground, but no one besides other adults paid me any sort of compliments. Some days, I vowed I wouldn't eat the next day. I read a lot of Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul and learned all about eating disorders, the psychological and physical scars they would leave on my body. I never developed one, although you might call the way that I waver between loving and hating food a form of disordered eating.

I don't remember a period of feeling really bad about myself all the time. My journal entries aren't filled with self-loathing and cursing my body. They're mostly observational of the people around me, of the daily goings-on in my life, the gossip from fifth grade, a rant about hating something or someone because I was somewhat sensitive as a child.

My relationship to food and my body has always challenged me. I've been told that I'm beautiful, whatever, by a lot of people, and that's nice to hear. But it's always, and you've just got such a pretty face! What's implied, then, to someone who is traditionally fat, is but your body is gross and unworthy of that word and you need to change it. I was somewhat active until the sixth grade, when my mom no longer could spare the time to coach my basketball team and I was coached by a man. I cried after a lot of practices and games and didn't really get the playing time I deserved. I quit basketball that year and started Irish dancing again the next, only to quit that in the eighth grade, when I started playing volleyball again.

In high school, my activity waned considerably, though I played volleyball again in the tenth grade and I gained a considerable amount of weight that year that stayed on until the eleventh grade, when I started doing yoga. Tenth grade deserves its own, separate post, but know that it was a long year without my mom, which meant unhealthy food at home, and in addition to a lot of sadness that lead to laziness and apathy, there wasn't much moving going on. Junior year, I started doing yoga and I lost, like, ten pounds in a month or something ridiculous and it was partially growing pains and the last stretch of developing "curves", but I started to develop a more adult body that I'm still growing into.

The summer before senior year, I went to my second writing camp, this time at a school called Walnut Hill School for the Arts. I was one of the oldest there but made some really solid, amazing friendships - but the girls were horribly insecure and constantly looking to me for validation. It made me similarly insecure, and looking for validation isn't something that should be shamed, but for me, it's just unnatural. I like to be paid attention to, but I can validate myself. We ended the program with a big, all-girls sleepover in my dorm and we did normal sleepover stuff, but the best thing we did was a compliment circle, where you basically went around in a circle and told random people the best things about them. A lot of the compliments were looks-based, as they often are with girls our age (and there ain't nothin' wrong with that), and also you're, like, a really great writer and I'm so jealous because, well, duh, it was a writing workshop. Of course a bunch of writers want to salivate over each others' writing styles.

But after these three weeks of being weirdly self-conscious (which probably had to do with the surplus of Really Cute Boys who paid absolutely no attention to my feminine wiles), the most meaningful compliment was told to me by a girl who I wasn't really close with at all but we had collaborated on a pretty funny one-act play. She told me, basically, that I had a really hot body. Like, yeah, I've got big boobs I guess and normal curves, but no one has ever told me that I might be hot and it's totally insane that the idea of me as a sexual being didn't really exist until that moment. In what universe could a fat girl with glasses be considered hot????

The fact that I'd never even considered being hot or sexy the way I am, the way I was that summer, is pretty demonstrative of the unhealthy body image our society perpetuates. That girl whose name I don't even remember (Abbie, I think) really impacted me and made me comfortable in my body the way I never had been before. It marked a better relationship with my body, and even though some days I look in the mirror and frown at the near mermaid-tail of my thighs or the weird look of back fat in some of my shirts, to this day, I'm happy with the way I look. I feel good and I want to be a healthy person and I want to continue to look in the mirror and like what I see for the rest of my life.

Being fat doesn't mean you're unhealthy. Skinny isn't equivalent to healthy. The average woman purportedly wears a size fourteen and I wear a size twelve. The last time I looked at the scale was the middle of the summer and it sent me into a body-image-related spiral that really put a bit of a damper in my summer fun. I am more than that three digit number, more than the cellulite on my thighs, and more than the media's skinny ideals of what I should look like if I want to be healthy.

I am so much more than my body.

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me a year ago

A year ago, I was two weeks away from leaving home for the first time and in the midst of my packing and sorting clothes and whatnot, I took this photograph:

July 2013 was kinda really hectic, my busiest month of the summer. It was sad and stressful and exciting and hazy and very very warm and rainy. And now it is behind me as is most of this summer and nothing really went how I wanted it to in May when I unpacked all my stuff from school and reveled in being home for four whole(ish) months.

Last summer, I spent almost all of my time alone. I watched a lot of TV and a lot of Netflix and didn't read as much as I wanted and spent every single weekend at a graduation party, where I saw all of my friends. Importantly, I spent a lot of last summer in a Really Bad Mood. 

Senior year was really bad and left me hard and raw and unwilling to really hang out with the people I'd spent the last four years laughing and having fun with. It wasn't really their fault. I shut myself off from them so that I could heal on my own, and even though I never let them in, I cursed them for not realizing or caring to notice that I wasn't alright and that I hadn't been in a very long time. (At the time, I didn't REALIZE or CARE TO NOTICE that they were going through their own stuff, too, see how great retrospect is????)

I didn't have a job but I wrote a lot a lot a lot and became even better friends with Rachel (we talked pretty much every day!) and learned a lot about myself by turning inward and thinking. I was excited for college, I guess, but more excited to leave all the hurt of high school behind me and to truly step into my role as an adult (even though in college everyone acts like they're still in high school for, like, two-ish years and I already felt beyond that).

I could write a billion things about college and how even though I literally lost every person I was friends with at university within a week I still really benefitted from the experience, but it would get trite eventually or whatever so I am here to notify that I have changed from the floral printed collared shirted long haired black and white filtered girl at the top of this page, just a lil bit.

I'm happier now than I was then and I feel better about myself and I like the way I look even though I feel small and big at the same time and I feel like I'm actually alive and not just a zombie. My time on my own helped me forge really good friendships via this scary vehicle known as the Internet and I am so glad that I got my year alone to have these friendships that I can't imagine the rest of my life without.

A year ago, I was looking forward to school and to "adulthood" for the wrong reasons. I was excited to get away from my family and my friends and my town and those aren't wrong reasons in the scope of other people but wrong on a personal level and this year, I am looking forward to so much, to my new classes, the possibilities afforded to me by attending university, even to things that are happening before I leave. Last year, it felt like all I ever had to look forward to was escaping, but now I've got so, so much more to be excited about.

And just for the fun of it all here is a pic of me a year later to round out this here article:

(Unfortunately, as it would seem, I look eXACTLY THE SAME!!! Kids entering college this fall DON'T EXPECT YOUR TIME AWAY TO CHANGE YOU you will still look like a little baby when you get home at the end of your first year!!)

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on running away

So I kind of sort of hate seeing people for the first time post my first year of college. Not out of any sort of weirdo antisocial impulses I may have (though I am rather extraordinarily introverted), but because I hate HATE HATE HATE HATE (HATE!!!!!!!!) the "so how was college" question.

In January, I wrote about the difficulties I had transitioning into my independent, big girl college life. I completely intended to transfer out of the big scary state institution I attend and into where I was (and am) certain would be a better fit: a small, liberal arts school with an amazing English program. I spent a lot of the second half of my first semester and the first half of my second with my scowly girl face on.

Really, I was acting like a victim. It was passive. I was letting things happen to me - I let the girls who were my friends ignore me and I didn't bother asking them what was wrong, because I'd come to my own deductions. It was me. I was wrong. And they'd just been waiting until the best time to cut the ties of our friendship and leave me in the dust. I let the only friend I had left at school make other, better, cooler friends, and couldn't muster up the courage to ask HEY! INVITE ME TO HANG ON WEEKEND NIGHTS! and instead I sat in my dorm room and sulked.

When second semester rolled around, I didn't really plan on making any friends because of the whole transferring thing. I needed to do better than first semester, to not only maintain my position in my school's honors program and also for my humungous ego which had taken quite the stabbing when I received my first semester's GPA.

I don't know what really changed my mind. I was succeeding in classes, eating on a regular basis and I was doing what I liked. Who cares that I wasn't out partying like ALL OF MY FRIENDS? I was doing what was fun for me and that was absolutely okay because no one was around to invite me to things and therefore staying in for a night wasn't QUITE as weird. But I think what solidified this whole "staying at school" thing was writing a midterm for one of my honors classes.

The assignment had no guidelines, really. On the first day of the class, we were told to answer the big ol' meaning of life question, and for the midterm, we were told to reflect on the person who responded and identify any changes. I wrote a letter to myself because that's what the assignment sheet suggested, and I didn't really expect it but I got an A PLUS which is a BIG STINKING DEAL for me.

There is a lot of power in retrospection and introspection. And through that introspection and reflection I realized the mistakes I would be making in transferring.

When I was a little kid, I always threatened to run away. My brother would be mean to me or my mom wouldn't let me watch TV or my family teased me and I would clamber upstairs, grab some of my most important things (beanie babies, books, my unnamed bear) and I would tiptoe outside. I wouldn't leave the confines of the yard or even the front driveway.

I'd seen the opportunities outside of living with my family. The hard stretch of the road, the spirals of the pavement, the lack of shelter in the suburb that we live in. And then I chickened out, went inside, apologized, and everything was all right again.

I have an amazing group of friends from high school who I'll probably never be able to get rid of, even if I want to. (And I don't want to!!! Ever!!!) I have a supportive family. I want to travel. I want to publish a book and I want to go to the best grad school I can and I want to do all of that without the weight of student loans on my shoulders.

Running away isn't going to change anything. It won't change that I'm an introvert and that I prefer to spend time alone with a book or a movie or a television show than go to a party or a club. I'm always going to be shy and afraid of rejection and spending a ton of money at a new school won't change anything.

So I'm going to stay where I am. And I'm going to be positive about it and I'm going to radiate that positivity outwards, always.

But you can't say that when someone asks you how college was. They want to know about the parties, the boys, the classes, the roommate, not so much whatever personal epiphany you came to midway through your second semester. Regardless, I always say it was good (because it was, overall, after it all), that next year I'll get more involved, that I did well in school. And I'll leave my victories to myself, tuck them into the pockets of my mind, spin them around until it's time to claim some new ones.

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a love letter to my childhood

So much of my childhood is laced in ambiguities that I cannot really dig through the mess to pull out the first. I can remember dreams and colors, can create a memory from a photograph, can tell myself this must be the beginning, but I didn't develop organizational skills early enough to put my memories in order as the happened and instead, I am left with a hazy, diluted mess.

Yet I can remember with astounding clarity the ride to my grandfather's lake house, from waking up at eight in the morning and helping load towels and sunscreen and groceries into the car, to the endless highway. The best part was always the ramp off the highway, the bends in the road that stirred up excitement, until the path to the causeway he lived on appeared. Framed with weeping willows and the Sandusky Bay on either side, it remains the best part of that drive. It is anticipation, the bridge before the chorus, the long stretch of adolescence into adulthood, when being young feels like it is infinite and recurring, that every day will be special.

And then the road curves. The weeping willows are replaced with huge, gray rocks and houses. This is where anticipation was made manifest, in the high rocks, little hands pressed against seats to propel upwards, to see over the rocks, to see the lake. Would it be calm or wavy? Warm or cold? The only way to find out was to strain our necks, to tug at the seat belt restrictions, to unroll dirty windows to see clearly. Just as we caught a good glimpse, though, we would arrive, and the car would turn into the driveway, and we would be able to experience it ourselves.

There was a time that my cousins were my best friends. That every weekend of every summer month was spent in the sunshine. This experience is mine, finite. My supposed children will never know the race into the lake, the burn of sun-soaked sand on anxious soles, the cool relief of diving into the lake water with the ever-present danger of parents looming on the shore, calling us in, bringing us closer. We were children of that house, the lake and bay curved together like parentheses. We were the space between.

We grew up. The parentheses closed. We no longer ate dinner with towels around our waists, eager to jump back in the pool, no, instead, we were busy packing our bags and drying our hair, eager to get home, to the television, to the promise of friends that we had found separately, apart from one another. And we diminished. Older cousins began to go to college, to get married, to start families that would never know those days at the lake, would never feel the anxiety, the excitement, the exhaustion from too much time in the sun. But not just any sun - but this sun. This beach, this house, this pool. Their lives, their experiences with water and sun would be distinct and separate from my own, and as I prepared for college, I felt that iridescent childhood begin to slip away from me, bit by bit.

A day at the lake would be spent in the kitchen, last summer, with my grandpa, or by the pool. In the pool, with my nephews or brothers, occasionally with my cousins and their own children, I came to the startling realization that never again would I regain that all day, everyday experience that only Sandusky could give me. Never again will I reclaim that notion of forever-youth, as though everything was and could be mine, that nothing was out of reach.

Now, perhaps, my childhood is sold away to strangers, a family I will never meet, who will create their own memories in the house whose walls are marked with the stains of my own youth. This tree, that I was pushed into, my knee torn open, this ledge of the pool that we rested blue and pink rafts against and slid into like the pool was eight feet deep rather than five.

Saying goodbye to Sandusky is like saying goodbye to my childhood. It is bitter and it is sweet and it will sorely be missed, not for current usage, as my interests have far outgrown those of the little girl who was always the last to get out of the lake, but missed the way your mouth misses the first teeth it loses. Eventually, something new will grow in.

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