Hi there.

How’s your world?

The temperature in California is rising just in time for school to start and I’m slowly realizing that these are my final days of summer, perhaps ever. This is about what that feels like.

AN UPDATE

But first, an update on the ever-present challenge that is running a blog.

After dealing with the infuriating madness that are WordPress errors all morning, I’m just happy to be writing again. Which is also to say, my apologies for the reposts in your email yesterday. I think the chaos is mostly sorted now, but I will say that after WordPress deleted my subscription plan during a plan switch, I’ve decided to do away with it for the time being. You will still need to be subscribed to read, but it’s free. That being said, I thank everyone who did buy subscription and have already issued your refund.

I’m still figuring out how exactly I want to proceed with the whole paid subscriber thing, as I stand behind the concept of it as outlined beautifully here and here by the wonderful Emma Gannon, but for now Spinning Visions will remain free.

ON LAST FIRSTS

That being said, here is what my world feels like right now.

I’m sitting outside in the warm evening air, slowly wading through the strangeness that will be my last first day of school. No one ever told me what that feels like, but I’ll tell you.

It’s like watching your life flash before your eyes, from the very first memory you have of preschool to the apple-scented hand sanitizer that your third grade teacher kept on her desk and the toxic pink lipgloss that you and your best friend practically drank from the tube in seventh grade.

You see your first day of high school and the utter shock that was public school. You feel the ocean breeze that blew through your hair as you sat on concrete stairwells at lunch, reading. You hear the unmistakable cacophony that was a Friday night football game but also the sheer silence that fell around you like a concrete cone as you realized that you hated those Friday night football games. That nothing had ever made you feel more alone.

You see your first apartment and the the first professor you ever felt inspired by and how it felt to realize that college was not such a hard and scary thing after all. That it was actually a bit of heaven brought down to earth, but that it’s now somehow already falling away.

WHEN IT’S TIME TO GO

You’re not supposed to feel energized and inspired after sixteen long years of institutionalized education in America. They do pretty much everything that they can to ensure this.

So I’m pretty sure that I’m supposed to be over it, that I’ve actually been due to be over it for about three years at this point. Maybe more. But I’m not. And not for the reasons that other college kids aren’t, like being afraid to go into the real world because they don’t know what they want to do yet. I can’t speak for what that feels like because I do know what I want and I actually can’t wait to go out and reach for it. The world is not what scares me. It’s the absence of academia within it that does.

I know I can go to graduate school or become a professor or teach or do any number of things that will keep me in school, but I’m not there yet. I’m here, staring down the last few months of college. I just want to process that right now. Because right now, that feels like a lot. It also feels oddly intense based solely on the fact that the last time I was a senior, getting ready to say goodbye, a global pandemic ended it all prematurely and I never got to. That doesn’t not still affect me. It’s blood stains my writing all of the time.

CHANGE

So I’m a bit dizzy from time spinning so fast around me all of the time and I can’t help but feel both very grown up and very young in the same moment.

But I’m also just excited. Because to be honest, I loathe summer. Every year, I pretend not to. I go to the beach and wear flip flops and lay in hammocks but all the while I am slowly losing my mind. By the end of August, I’m dying to be back in a classroom. And when I see that first pumpkin candle hit the shelves in the stores, serotonin floods my bloodstream like a school of tiny fish. It’s embarrassing.

But I’m still sitting with my feet dangling in the pool, trying to feel all of August before giving into September. I’m always talking about how thrilled I am for the future, and I am. But I also know that my life won’t ever feel just like this again, and that’s an exhilaratingly beautiful tragedy.

Nostalgia is already planting it’s seeds.

Love always, m.