Lightning, and Other Surprising Combustions

Ten years ago this summer, I got out of a rental car on the south side of the Dartmouth green, looked around, then glanced sheepishly over at my dad, who had been driving.

“Oh,” I said to him. He eyed me dryly over the hood of the car, and I grinned. “Well…yeah. Call off the search.”

When we had originally set out on my college tour, Dartmouth hadn’t been on the list. My dad’s reasoning had been that I didn’t need to take the tour if I could give the tour, on account of having spent so much time there when my sisters were students. However, when we drove up the east coast that summer, it came as a surprise to me that there were other colleges out there; beautiful, interesting places where I could be very happy. Honest to God, this laughably obvious concept had never occurred to me, and it was quite intriguing.

The official logic that put Dartmouth back on the tour list was that now that I had some context, I could reevaluate it realistically, apples to apples. Personally, I think my dad noticed that I was getting starry-eyed at Princeton and got a little nervous.

As it turns out, he didn’t have anything to worry about.

When I got out of the car that day on my college tour, I had the odd sensation of both novelty and familiarity: the new adventure tingles and the coming home comfort. In retrospect, and very self-consciously, I recognize this sensation as being remarkably similar to falling in love: the perfect, inexplicable, and elusive combustion of chemistry and certainty, pheromones and faith, even if the latter turns out to be misguided. In this case, my faith was well-placed, and I ended up spending four very happy years in the still North.

I remember that when we arrived in town that day, the sky had been ostentatiously blue, and the air had had that golden, syrupy summer hum to it. As we left later that afternoon, the sky turned black and a whopper of a thunderstorm let loose. Always a fan of storms, I took it as a weird benediction from the universe and felt inexcusably smug in my certainty.

A week ago today, I got out of a rental car in another tiny Northeastern town, looked around, and waited.

And felt nothing but anxiety and a damp, drizzling rain.

Since I began looking at art history graduate schools, my affiliations had crept slowly towards this particular institution, buried deep within the Berkshires and recognized as one of the best programs in the world. Almost without noticing, I started to build a very familiar fantasy here—a few blissful years of getting a top-notch education in the wonderfully isolated woods of New England—and it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep things in perspective. To be honest, I’m not sure what I was expecting when I got to town, but I was certainly expecting something: not a thunderstorm, maybe, but at least a spark.

After a less than stellar interview, as the drizzle turned into a freezing downpour, I sat in my rental car and sobbed on the steering wheel. I was at a complete loss: usually interviews are my strong suit, but my answers had sounded flat and over-generalized, even to my own ears. At the time, there was nothing I could do, other than pull myself together, pick up a strawberry milkshake, and make my way back to Boston.

At home that night, installed on my couch with an emergency glass of Scotch from the good bottle, I tried to reevaluate and tease out exactly what I was feeling, because “just plain shitty” did not seem terribly insightful. Some things were pretty easy to discern: I was embarrassed and unexpectedly vulnerable from falling flat in my interview, since charisma with strangers is usually one of my strengths. The possibility of rejection now loomed rather than flickered; instead of an untried idea, which I could dismiss with the right distraction, it was practically corporeal.

So I drank Scotch, sulked deeply, and called them by name: on Nausea, on Embarrassment, on Likely Rejection! On Bitter Disappointment, and Outright Dejection!

But after my foray into dealing with issues through sarcastic rhyme, I realized, with some surprise, that there were a few emotions left in the reindeer barn (so to speak). I approached with caution.

What I found, upon closer inspection, was that not all of my disappointment was self-directed. In fact, I had been a bit disappointed in the program itself. As my interviewer described the program to me, noting fondly that many students had wept over their impossible German distribution in the very chair in which I found myself, I did not experience a desperate, passionate need to be one of those students. (It’s a miracle: in the last few years, I seem to have unexpectedly stopped finding masochistic satisfaction in being miserable—progress!) The tiny, intense program, when viewed from the ground instead of from my own mind, suddenly felt claustrophobic.

As soon as I thought this, my mind turned back on itself sternly: was I discounting the program and finding fault with it because I thought it was doing the same to me?

Somehow, unexpectedly, I think not.

I have a very vivid memory from the interview that would eventually lead to my first miserable but necessary job out of college. By that point, as I neared a solid year of job applications and rejections, I had been willing to sell myself on almost anything. But after that interview, I went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded out loud.

I didn’t have a good answer then, and my answer for the next sixteen months relied on a deeply unsatisfying sense of obligation and responsibility: I was there because I had to be there.

Now, though, I think I’m experiencing an entirely new luxury: the possibility of an alternative. Part of the anxiety that had plagued me throughout my interview may have actually been that same question: what the hell was I doing here? I just hadn’t been expecting that particular sentiment to be part of the conversation.

I had assumed lightning would strike again, and now I was dealing with the unexpectedly enlightening aftermath of the fact that it hadn’t.

I woke up the morning after my graduate school interview with an expansive sense of freedom. Fantasies about school in California, Colorado, and London spooled themselves out in my mind as the program in the Berkshires shrank back down to a more manageable size. In reality, it has always been one possibility out of several, but now I’m finally thinking about it that way. I’m still nervous about letting go of this prearranged comfort zone, the idea of an ideal, but I never anticipated how intoxicating it could be to have the opportunity to change my mind.

And here I thought being intensely stubborn would always serve me well—who knew?

There was another possibility, another scenario that could have played out ten years ago on the edge of the Dartmouth green. There was a chance I could have looked around, glanced over at my dad, and shrugged. No lightning? No big deal. There were a lot of other great places out there.

Maybe what I’ve learned in the interim is that in waiting for the lightning to strike, you cheat yourself out of some fairly exhilarating autonomy; that there can still be such a thing as “the place I’m meant to be,” but that I get to decide what that is. As it turns out, I’m the one who chooses my choices. I have no idea where I’ll end up getting into graduate school, and I’m sure there are many more hysterical emotions in the barn yet to be named (and rhymed!), but I like the idea of letting go of preordination, getting over the idea that there is only one right answer, and taking that finicky lightning into my own hands.

Because really, who wouldn’t mind controlling their own personal weather?