Hi! What have you been up to this week?

I’ve been doing everything that I love: going for really long walks, writing, cooking, and spending some quality time coloring with my four year old neighbor. There’s nothing like hanging out with a kid to make you feel better about life. They are so honest and curious and they love you with their whole, un-jaded hearts. It’s perfection. Plus, you get to put ladybug stickers on your hands and use crayons again. Who doesn’t need some of that?

But anyway.

Today I’m sharing a story that I probably wouldn’t tell if it weren’t for this one weird thing that keeps happening.

Every time I write the date down in my journal, I hesitate over the year. It’s May. The year is almost half way over and I still can’t wrap my mind around the idea of it. You could tell me that is is 2022 or 2024 or 2027 and I don’t think I would flinch. I would just say okay, sure. Why not. I know that time speeds up the older that you get. But it’s a gradual, murky process and you don’t realize it all at once. You can’t nail down the exact moment that it time began to play tricks on you. But this is different. I can. I can tell you the exact date in which time ceased to make any sense at all. I think it did for all of us.

THE END OF SOMETHING

They say that when someone dies, it’s important to view the body. It helps you process and accept that a death has occurred, that it is real.

No one died. But when I was seventeen, the world as I knew it did.

I walked out of my high school one day not knowing that it would be my last. None of us did. The funny thing was, I actually skipped my last class that day to rendezvous with the art museum. I didn’t know that there wouldn’t be another, that those bells would never ring for me again. I was a carefree senior. And then I wasn’t. A pandemic was crawling across continents, wrapping its tendrils so tightly around the world that no one could breathe. No one dared to. It was unlike anything that I had ever seen. Emails became the bearers of all the bad news that year. Oh God. The emails! They were like grenades dropped into my inbox. I think we all probably felt that during that year. Emails instructing us to not return to campus, to pick up our diplomas in the parking lot in June, that there would be no prom, no graduation, no goodbye. I could have cared less about prom or senior night or whatever else the kids of that school clung on to for life. It was the total lack of closure that gutted me.

Something had died. That’s what they told me. But I never saw the body. None of us did. We pressed pause on a movie that it never occurred to us that we wouldn’t see the end of. I talked in my last post about how strange it is to stop knowing people. I related it to seeing the end of a movie and then wondering what came next. But this was worse than that. This was stopping the movie right before the end, right before everything was supposed to come together and make sense and mean something. Endings assign meaning to all that came before. And we didn’t get ours.

THE BEGINNING OF ANOTHER

As that spring melted into summer, emails continued to bring bad news. I had just been denied an ending, now I was being told that I would miss a beginning too. My university didn’t want anyone on that campus come fall. I would complete my entire freshman year from home, through my laptop. That was jarring, but I’m such a nerd that I sort of made the most out of it anyway. The true effect of it, as it turned out, would not be felt until the following year, when I did move out and step onto campus for the first time. I felt like a freshman but they told me I wasn’t. They told me it was a whole year later and that I was a sophomore. I didn’t believe them. It felt like trying to figure out what was happening in a movie that you did not see the beginning of. Where was I? And how did I get there? Who were these people? I had this persistent sensation of being late for something and whether that was my ceramics class in high school or my Tuesday lecture in college, I couldn’t really tell you. I wasn’t a freshman.There was no dorm life, no orientation, or any of the things that are set up to help you find your footing. I was simply thrown into the deep end.

And, to be honest, the problem wasn’t that I couldn’t swim. It was that I could. And because of that, I never reached out for anyone or anything else like I might have done if I were any less independent or less used to being alone. I was fine. I was great. I was having the time of my life going to classes and talking to my professors and reading all of these brilliant articles and books. I have loved college. It has fed my soul in ways that I never could have imagined. Academically, I’ve excelled to an extent that is just kind of ridiculous. I’ve grown so much stronger and wiser and more myself. That much has been like heaven, really. But everything else, the lifelong friends and connections and that feeling of truly belonging somewhere, these were casualties of the war that was that first, disintegrated year.

MISSING PIECES

Now it’s somehow coming to an end and they say I am graduating this fall and certain things have been really tripping me up about that. Like last night. I was watching this movie where the girl was going off to college. And in my mind, for one moment, I felt this little rush, like oh I can’t wait to do that. That looks so cool and fun and important. And then it hit me that I’m a senior. I have no coherent concept of this because my college experience has been a body badly broken. It’s been butchered and mangled and I have been sucking on the marrow of broken bones for the past three years, extracting all the nutrients that I can from the decaying pieces of what I spent years looking forward to. I don’t know where any of it went. No one has ever been able to show me.

But the point I’m trying to make here is really just about time and how it has felt like water running through my fingers ever since that spring of my senior year. There are these huge moments of my life, graduating high school and starting college, that are missing from my memory. Technically, they occurred. But I never saw the body of one or the birth of the other. And everyone knows that endings and beginning are how we make sense of our lives. The middle parts are what we forget. They are what blur together. And for the past few years, I’ve had nothing but them.

VALIDATING YOUR EXPERIENCES

I’m usually pretty hesitant to even tell this story because I know how much worse it could be. I mean, I’ve been at college not war. It’s a privilege. I know this. But I think that there is something to be said about allowing yourself to fully feel your own experiences without diluting them with comparison. I used to always feel guilty if I felt bad about anything because I knew others were suffering more. I always felt like whatever I was going through was somehow invalid, even if it felt like the worst hell I had ever known. And then someone told me that brilliant quote, “Saying someone can’t be sad because someone else may have it worse is like saying someone can’t be happy because someone else may have it better”, and it changed my whole outlook. Like yeah, it could have been worse. But you know what? It also could have been a hell of a lot better. Being seventeen was hard enough without entire world stopping on its axis. I’m done pretending that it wasn’t a big deal. It’s not being conscientious or radically self-aware to invalidate your own experiences. It’s just toxic. If it feels like hell at the time, then it is hell. And if it matters to you, it matters period.

“Saying someone can’t be sad because someone else may have it worse is like saying someone can’t be happy because someone else may have it better.”

It’s my story and I’ll cry if I want to.

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