Though I’ve worked for a large university for almost two years, it was not until recently that I went to work on the main campus. I should have known the fall was truly upon us when small family groups—generally two parents and an anxious-looking upper-adolescent—started boarding my daily bus with enormous bags of bedding and shower accessories. It only really hit me yesterday as I walked through the main quad on my lunch break. Large tents are not uncommon on campus, but the one that now covered a large swath of grass had an enormous sign: FIRST YEAR KEY PICK UP.
My own beloved alma mater did not have such a tent—instead, there was a small office in the basement of one of the central dorms, accessible through a backdoor in a parking lot. My parents and I went there first when we arrived on campus. It must have been pretty familiar to them by then; not only the freshman key pick up, but that very office: both of my sisters had picked up their keys there before me. What we didn’t know (though I wonder if they suspected) was that of the three of us who attended, I would be the one who would love it the most.
The clearest memory I have of the day my parents dropped me off at school came towards the end of the afternoon. It had started to rain a little, and I was wearing my brand new college hoodie, which I had purposefully gotten about three sizes too big. Just before they left, my dad turned and called out to me the exact phrase his father had said to him thirty-five years earlier as he was departing for the same college. After they drove away, I took a deep, shaky breath and walked up the steps of a then-unfamiliar building. I knew that, good or bad, something very big was starting.
But more importantly, here are the things I didn’t know:
I didn’t know that my mother was desperately trying to suppress panic for most of the day: she was convinced that between the bad weather and my asthma, I would probably need to be evacuated by helicopter at some point during the canoe trip I was about to embark upon. I also didn’t know that after they left me, my parents were both crying so hard that they missed their exit and had to drive about fifty miles out of their way to the next one.
I didn’t know that the unfamiliar building I was entering would become my second home on campus (I do know for a fact that I spent more waking hours in that building than I did in any dorm I lived in). That I would eat innumerable lunches on those steps and meet people there who now form my insides. That I would lie in the grass, walk through the mud, stomp through the leaves, and roll in the snow outside that building for four very, very good years.
That a year after graduation, I would visit campus, sit on the same steps, and try very hard not to cry because something else was beginning—my adult life—and I felt like I didn’t know anything.
My parents took a picture of me as I was walking away that I didn’t see until a few years later. I am wearing a pair of blue jeans that I would later wear out while studying in Italy and the giant green hoodie that now has stains all up one arm from a radio-active hot chocolate spill at Homecoming. Having grown into my place at college (if not the sweatshirt), I was always surprised at how small I look in that photo.
Colleges go out of their way to welcome their incoming freshmen—I know that mine did, most obviously in the form of upperclassmen, who chopped off varying degrees of hair, dyed the remainder psychedelic colors, and danced around in resplendent flair. But the real world? Not so much. My college life began with an acceptance letter, and my adulthood began with nine months of rejection. Adulthood orientation has not been nearly as much fun as college, but I think that’s just part of the deal.
My current landscape continues to become more familiar, but eventually I will need to leave it to do something else. And I’m sure it will be scary in all sorts of unique and debilitating ways, so something I should learn is the ability to turn my faith forward. When you’re starting something new and suitably terrifying, it’s almost impossible to be confident in anything, save your own nausea, and the definition of faith necessarily includes confidence: “Faith is the confident belief or trust in the truth or trustworthiness of a person, concept or thing.” Maybe when starting something new, I need to borrow confidence from where I was before: I earned it, I saved it, and now I literally owe it to myself. The confidence I learned as a freshman before might be able to fuel the faith I need in the future.
There still lots of things I don’t know, but maybe that can be something that I believe.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Just One of Those Things
In high school, after a trying day, it was not uncommon for me to come home, dump my backpack beside the couch, and announce to my mother that I needed my gravy boat. She would nod sympathetically as I sat down on the carpet next to the lower shelves in our kitchen’s island. The gravy boat in question was a beautiful piece of fine china from Limoges in the Autumn Leaf pattern. It was permanently fastened to its dish and had painted gold details on the lip and handles. If the day had been particularly rough, I might even go so far as to pull out a flat soup dish or two. I very seldom needed to go as far as hauling out the teacups, but I knew they were there if I needed them.
Call it object therapy.
I read an article recently that said in terms of the money/happiness relationship, you get more of the latter if you spend more of the former on travel as opposed to material objects—the point being that experiences, rather than stuff, are more consistently likely to make you happy. Having recently entered the final month before a long awaited, self-funded trip to Spain, I was certainly encouraged. I also didn’t miss the fact that the real thing that makes us happy is interactions and relationships with other people: it makes a certain amount of sense that tromping through Barcelona in my beat-to-hell Tevas with one of my best friends will make me happier than buying several pairs of obscenely expensive, if lovely, shoes.
Nevertheless, I would make an argument for the occasional object. Stuff for the sake of stuff has always been something of a touchy issue for me—I realize its folly most of the time, but I have also been known to take joy in retail therapy (I recall in particular an instance with purple leather gloves—my motivations are sometimes unknown even to me). However, I do believe that material objects aren’t always equivalent to just stuff.
When I would sit with that gravy boat and be comforted, I think it’s safe to say I wasn’t only sitting with a gravy boat. I was sitting with my grandmother, with whom I shared a deep love of beautiful things made priceless by the history they carry. The Autumn Leaf china was her mother’s, whose story I learned over countless cups of tea—one of many histories that reinforce who I am even as I protect their memory: we guard each other. For most Christmases and birthdays, I would get a fruit compote or salad plate to fill out the set. My grandmother and I agreed that the gravy boat was the crown jewel of the lot, so almost without realizing it, I anchored years of love and comfort to it.
A few days after she died, just before I left for the airport to fly back to school, I swiped her last box of Tic Tacs from a basket on the kitchen counter because it was something to see, something to hold in my hand—a small signifier of a very large love, because she was not there anymore, and I needed something to hold.
I make the case for objects not as things, but as artifacts of experience. I grew up with the sense that I did not construct the things in my head in a ‘normal’ way; that my own mind could be called into question at any time, making my thoughts and memories somehow invalid. As a result, I came to assign very intense meaning to things—objects that I could hold out as proof of the things in my mind; undeniable evidence that something had been there, and it had been important. I came to realize later, of course, that there is no normal, that what I had learned was a doubted ‘idiosyncrasy’ could actually be interpreted just as easily as a unique ‘personality.’ My instinct to anchor, though, remained.
A few days ago, I was walking through an open air market with someone who makes me deliriously happy, which is always a good place to end the weekend. One of the things I love most intensely about him is his ability to make the things about which I am most self-conscious seem like the most natural things in the world, to make my quirks seem both normal and special. As we walked, we had been talking about our love of objects that contain memories and history. He had been looking that day for something glass to have in his apartment, and he turned to me and said, “Why don’t we buy something together, and have today be the memory for it?”
Were I to say something like that, I would instantly berate myself as cheesy and ridiculous, even if I did believe it whole-heartedly. Another thing I love about him is that he makes me feel that if I believe in something whole-heartedly, my believing in it is all the validation it needs.
We ended up picking a glass perfume bottle that, oddly enough, had scenery straight from our past painted right on it. He is taking the first shift in our joint custody arrangement, and he’ll bring it to me when he visits. It was a strange reversal for me, because for the first time an object didn’t simply anchor a memory for me: it was also proof of a possibility, and it was proof to someone else too.
I would always choose a person over an object, because even though I do love my things, I know the one is just a stand-in for the other. But it is comforting in a very real way to be able to hold my gravy boat and think of my grandmother, and to know that somewhere, it is entirely possible that someone is looking at a little glass bottle and really wishing I were there.
And really, if at the end of the day, you have some combination of comforting memories, beautiful things, and people to love, you could do a lot worse.
Call it object therapy.
I read an article recently that said in terms of the money/happiness relationship, you get more of the latter if you spend more of the former on travel as opposed to material objects—the point being that experiences, rather than stuff, are more consistently likely to make you happy. Having recently entered the final month before a long awaited, self-funded trip to Spain, I was certainly encouraged. I also didn’t miss the fact that the real thing that makes us happy is interactions and relationships with other people: it makes a certain amount of sense that tromping through Barcelona in my beat-to-hell Tevas with one of my best friends will make me happier than buying several pairs of obscenely expensive, if lovely, shoes.
Nevertheless, I would make an argument for the occasional object. Stuff for the sake of stuff has always been something of a touchy issue for me—I realize its folly most of the time, but I have also been known to take joy in retail therapy (I recall in particular an instance with purple leather gloves—my motivations are sometimes unknown even to me). However, I do believe that material objects aren’t always equivalent to just stuff.
When I would sit with that gravy boat and be comforted, I think it’s safe to say I wasn’t only sitting with a gravy boat. I was sitting with my grandmother, with whom I shared a deep love of beautiful things made priceless by the history they carry. The Autumn Leaf china was her mother’s, whose story I learned over countless cups of tea—one of many histories that reinforce who I am even as I protect their memory: we guard each other. For most Christmases and birthdays, I would get a fruit compote or salad plate to fill out the set. My grandmother and I agreed that the gravy boat was the crown jewel of the lot, so almost without realizing it, I anchored years of love and comfort to it.
A few days after she died, just before I left for the airport to fly back to school, I swiped her last box of Tic Tacs from a basket on the kitchen counter because it was something to see, something to hold in my hand—a small signifier of a very large love, because she was not there anymore, and I needed something to hold.
I make the case for objects not as things, but as artifacts of experience. I grew up with the sense that I did not construct the things in my head in a ‘normal’ way; that my own mind could be called into question at any time, making my thoughts and memories somehow invalid. As a result, I came to assign very intense meaning to things—objects that I could hold out as proof of the things in my mind; undeniable evidence that something had been there, and it had been important. I came to realize later, of course, that there is no normal, that what I had learned was a doubted ‘idiosyncrasy’ could actually be interpreted just as easily as a unique ‘personality.’ My instinct to anchor, though, remained.
A few days ago, I was walking through an open air market with someone who makes me deliriously happy, which is always a good place to end the weekend. One of the things I love most intensely about him is his ability to make the things about which I am most self-conscious seem like the most natural things in the world, to make my quirks seem both normal and special. As we walked, we had been talking about our love of objects that contain memories and history. He had been looking that day for something glass to have in his apartment, and he turned to me and said, “Why don’t we buy something together, and have today be the memory for it?”
Were I to say something like that, I would instantly berate myself as cheesy and ridiculous, even if I did believe it whole-heartedly. Another thing I love about him is that he makes me feel that if I believe in something whole-heartedly, my believing in it is all the validation it needs.
We ended up picking a glass perfume bottle that, oddly enough, had scenery straight from our past painted right on it. He is taking the first shift in our joint custody arrangement, and he’ll bring it to me when he visits. It was a strange reversal for me, because for the first time an object didn’t simply anchor a memory for me: it was also proof of a possibility, and it was proof to someone else too.
I would always choose a person over an object, because even though I do love my things, I know the one is just a stand-in for the other. But it is comforting in a very real way to be able to hold my gravy boat and think of my grandmother, and to know that somewhere, it is entirely possible that someone is looking at a little glass bottle and really wishing I were there.
And really, if at the end of the day, you have some combination of comforting memories, beautiful things, and people to love, you could do a lot worse.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Twenty-Four Working on Thirteen
There is a girl who lives in my head. She can’t ever seem to nail down a good hair cut, but that’s probably because the odds are stacked against her in the form of greasy bangs. She has braces, but they haven’t been on long enough to have made much progress in combating a huge overbite and defining her previously non-existent chin. She has acne, but that’s nothing new—she’s had it for a few years, certainly before the rest of her peers. Her immediate family is populated by intelligent, funny, charming people who all have straight teeth and, at the bare minimum, seven years on her; she has been the odd man out in a family of pairs since day one. She is extremely fond of a blue, furry bucket hat and using big words that her oldest sister teaches her sometimes. She can’t articulate it yet, but deep down she probably knows that she is most grating and annoying when she is most desperate to be seen and liked.
Meet me, at age thirteen.
I have a theory that we don’t discard the outdated versions of ourselves; we absorb them, like rings in a tree. If you take an emotional cross-section of who I am, she’s definitely in there, close to the core, with a remarkable ability to inform my actions to this day.
In situations of anxiety and uncertainty, I can feel her rising to the surface. The desperation to be liked bubbles up, and I realize particularly in those moments that being calm, being cool, are things that I am still decidedly not good at.
People don’t respond well to desperation. Maybe it’s evolutionary: it makes a certain amount of sense not to welcome someone to your campfire for some mammoth barbeque if you know that person is ravenously hungry. In an emotional way, it might be the same preservation instinct: you can smell when someone wants something from you, and you guard your own reserves jealously.
The irony is that my adolescent desperation to be liked actually distracted from the fact that, when you peeled away all of the anxiety, that thirteen year old was imminently likeable. She’s got a mind like a steel-trap and can quote “Monty Python” with astounding accuracy. She reads voraciously and makes a mean grilled cheese sandwich. She’s funny, in her own nerdy way. And having spent a lot of time on the lonely side of the campfire, she can be unexpectedly empathetic and fiercely loyal.
I was too young to remember my sisters’ tragic, awkward phases. Even if I caught the tail end, I was still watching them through the lens of the worshipful little sister. As they grew up, my sisters disparaged who they had been—my oldest sister in particular scoffed at her former selves. The underlying theme I learned was that whoever I was at the moment was going to be an embarrassing memory in a few short years. But what good does that do? How does sneering at who you were then make you better or more mature now? It doesn’t. It never did.
It is so easy to remember who I was in two dimensions, to blame my inner desperation to be liked on an awkward, greasy nerd from 1998, but the blame game doesn’t work so well when, at the end of the day, you're still just blaming yourself. I’m also falling into the same trap that left me so lonely all those years ago: I’m not peeling back all of the anxiety to see who lives underneath it. Maybe that’s the real irony—that in trying to ignore the more anxious parts of myself, I’m also ignoring the really strong parts that are woven into it. Because it’s not as though characteristics can be lined up side by side like crayons in a box: they bleed into one another, inform each other, and bolster themselves in a whole that turns out to be you.
So in times of stress, when things that I really care about are on the line—a new dream job, falling in love—and I feel the panic rising, maybe I can simply acknowledge that it’s there, and see the person who’s standing behind it:
There’s a woman inside my head. She enjoys wearing black and is fond of heavy boots, something she has in common with her thirteen year old self. She arranges her bookshelf autobiographically and prefers driving stick shift. Her friends are all forms of wild and kind and smart and special, and she loves them intensely. She always carries hydrocortisone and floss in her purse, just in case, and the reason she is growing out her hair is so she never has to wear it down. She knows exactly where the fantasy shelves are in her favorite bookstores and makes a mean peanut butter cookie. And she has a secret desire to travel back in time to meet her thirteen year old self, and be kind to her, and tell her to hold on, because things really will get better, but that in the mean time, who she is at thirteen is just fine as she is.
Meet me, at age thirteen.
I have a theory that we don’t discard the outdated versions of ourselves; we absorb them, like rings in a tree. If you take an emotional cross-section of who I am, she’s definitely in there, close to the core, with a remarkable ability to inform my actions to this day.
In situations of anxiety and uncertainty, I can feel her rising to the surface. The desperation to be liked bubbles up, and I realize particularly in those moments that being calm, being cool, are things that I am still decidedly not good at.
People don’t respond well to desperation. Maybe it’s evolutionary: it makes a certain amount of sense not to welcome someone to your campfire for some mammoth barbeque if you know that person is ravenously hungry. In an emotional way, it might be the same preservation instinct: you can smell when someone wants something from you, and you guard your own reserves jealously.
The irony is that my adolescent desperation to be liked actually distracted from the fact that, when you peeled away all of the anxiety, that thirteen year old was imminently likeable. She’s got a mind like a steel-trap and can quote “Monty Python” with astounding accuracy. She reads voraciously and makes a mean grilled cheese sandwich. She’s funny, in her own nerdy way. And having spent a lot of time on the lonely side of the campfire, she can be unexpectedly empathetic and fiercely loyal.
I was too young to remember my sisters’ tragic, awkward phases. Even if I caught the tail end, I was still watching them through the lens of the worshipful little sister. As they grew up, my sisters disparaged who they had been—my oldest sister in particular scoffed at her former selves. The underlying theme I learned was that whoever I was at the moment was going to be an embarrassing memory in a few short years. But what good does that do? How does sneering at who you were then make you better or more mature now? It doesn’t. It never did.
It is so easy to remember who I was in two dimensions, to blame my inner desperation to be liked on an awkward, greasy nerd from 1998, but the blame game doesn’t work so well when, at the end of the day, you're still just blaming yourself. I’m also falling into the same trap that left me so lonely all those years ago: I’m not peeling back all of the anxiety to see who lives underneath it. Maybe that’s the real irony—that in trying to ignore the more anxious parts of myself, I’m also ignoring the really strong parts that are woven into it. Because it’s not as though characteristics can be lined up side by side like crayons in a box: they bleed into one another, inform each other, and bolster themselves in a whole that turns out to be you.
So in times of stress, when things that I really care about are on the line—a new dream job, falling in love—and I feel the panic rising, maybe I can simply acknowledge that it’s there, and see the person who’s standing behind it:
There’s a woman inside my head. She enjoys wearing black and is fond of heavy boots, something she has in common with her thirteen year old self. She arranges her bookshelf autobiographically and prefers driving stick shift. Her friends are all forms of wild and kind and smart and special, and she loves them intensely. She always carries hydrocortisone and floss in her purse, just in case, and the reason she is growing out her hair is so she never has to wear it down. She knows exactly where the fantasy shelves are in her favorite bookstores and makes a mean peanut butter cookie. And she has a secret desire to travel back in time to meet her thirteen year old self, and be kind to her, and tell her to hold on, because things really will get better, but that in the mean time, who she is at thirteen is just fine as she is.
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