It feels wild to say that it’s been just over a month since I started grad school—it feels like two, at least, or maybe like I’ve been doing this forever. And yet, I still haven’t quite found my footing or figured out how to balance the workload with my own set of needs. Each week flies by, and while I no longer feel underwater like I did at the beginning, it’s still a little like a Tilt-A-Whirl at one of those traveling carnivals, the ones that abruptly wrench you up, down, forward, and back, upending any bit of gravity you take for granted.
On Wednesday of last week, I submitted my first piece for Workshop, which means this Wednesday the whole class will spend about 45 minutes discussing it while I listen quietly and take notes. Terrifying. And yet also kind of thrilling?
I keep coming back to the same two words as I try to make sense of it all: surreal and surrender.
It’s mind-blowing to get the thing you want.
Growing up, I had the acute sense that there was a cap on what you could ask for as if somehow winnowing down your dreams meant you were more likely to get them. As if the act of wanting in and of itself was indecent.
I remember watching my favorite movies at the time (mostly those late 90s rom-coms—10 Things I Hate About You, She’s All That, Almost Famous, Clueless) and thinking that adulthood, that figuring out who you were, happened somewhere between your senior year of high school and your first big early-mid 20s career win. In my understanding it was linear, a two-for-one deal where once you got the guy or girl you’d also get the school or job you desperately wanted (or vice versa.)
In most cases, the movies ended just after the crescendo of that second win and I was just fine with that. I actively tried not to imagine the characters a few years down the road, because even at that age I understood that you couldn’t sustain movie magic indefinitely. It seemed obvious that Kat Stratford (Julia Stiles) from 10 Things would go on to Sarah Lawrence (heeeey) like she planned and Patrick (Heath Ledger) would end up selling obscure socialist poetry in a bookstore in Oakland. If they even tried to keep dating, they’d only make it a few years before realizing even the most mature 20-year-old deserves the space and freedom to be an untethered dumb fuck for a while.