⋆˙⟡ Life Updates: Moving, Starting, Studying⋆˙⟡

Peyton and I went to Disney World together for Christmas in 2021. It is just one of the many great memories I have with my brother: us scurrying about eating Cat Tails at the Cheshire Café and drinking blue milk at Galaxy's Edge, finding our Poseidon fountain in Italy at Epcot, riding Living With the Land every single night before dinner (he was a good sport about it), and experiencing Splash Mountain together for the last time.

Toward the end of our trip we walked through all of the shops. I love the Emporium on Main Street in Magic Kingdom and on this particular trip I was absolutely dying over the storybook journals. I had already spent the money I'd allotted myself on some Tinker Bell earrings, and I told Peyton I would never buy one of the storybooks anyway, not only because they were $35, but because I’d be too scared to even write in it. The thought of scribbling over spelling mistakes and sentence fragments felt like doing the book an injustice; it was just too pretty. I didn’t think much of it when I said it, and to be honest it probably doesn’t go much deeper than me just not wanting to aesthetically fuck up the book. But I also know that I tend to hold myself to the unattainable standard of being perfect on paper – the paper that is my journal, the paper that is the mirror, and the paper that is the way others perceive me.

We split up and did our own shopping for a while. It was nighttime after the fireworks, I think, right before the park closed so I’m sure I was taking pictures of the castle and trying to breathe in the few last smells that the Plaza Ice Cream Parlor had to offer. When we met back up, he had the book. He had bought it for me as a Christmas present. And when he gave it to me, in his very casual Peyton way, he said: “don’t be too scared to write in it.”

I really, truly doubt Peyton has ever thought about saying that to me since we left the park that night. It's been 4 years and I bring up the book every chance I get, each time hoping that he can see I'm still trying to find a way to say thank you. I brought it with me to Virginia because it is one of my favorite things I have in my little library. But, really, it's his words that I think about all of the time. The kindness behind them. I have the book now on my coffee table in my living room. This whole story is to say 3 things: 1. I love my brother and I miss him every time I leave for school. 2. I got a new coffee table today. 3. Having confidence in the people you love means more to them than you, me, all of us probably realize.

"9 1/2 hours away from home" were just words to me while I was waiting on my decision from UVA. I just saw it for what it was, and I knew on paper how far away Virginia was from Indiana, but until I was offered a spot in the grad program I didn't actually let myself think about it too much. There was some sort of wall there that prevented me from actually letting myself feel anything about it whether it was excitement, anxiety, or fear. I wasn't particularly indifferent, I just didn't want the duty of backpedaling through all of the emotion if I didn't get in. Now, curiosity, though, didn't give a shit about that wall. I was constantly looking up professors and publications online as well as events that were going on at the University. I was extremely curious, I will give you that. And, I will admit, I was pretty hopeful. But curiosity comes in all sorts of fashions and it isn't necessarily accompanied by any sort of specific emotion. I've had lots of bad curiosity and also curiosity that was driven by some ulterior motive, but curiosity is an idea that we can get into at a later time. It's something I focused on a lot in my application and a foundation that I intend on orienting my classroom around in the future. I wonder if this brings up any memory of the Wonder posters they used to have all around the elementary schools for you like it does for me? Maybe not, if you weren't in elementary school circa 2008. Anyway, allow me to make an incredibly oversimplified statement with the intention of elaborating later by saying that I think curiosity, truly, is the driving force of life. But anyway, putting a pin in that and coming back to it at a later date.

Mom at UVA in 2023

When I got my letter of acceptance I seriously felt like Bella in Breaking Dawn when she opens her eyes for the first time as a vampire and all of a sudden she can see further and with immaculate detail and is so overwhelmed by her senses that she just has to run. Corny ass example, I know. But it was in April and I had driven back to Bloomington from home on a Sunday night. I woke up Monday morning at 8 AM to an email from a professor in the UVA English Department and I immediately put my book bag in my car and drove the 3 hours back home because I wanted to be able to tell my mom, in person, that I got in. I emailed Professor Irvin who taught the "Revolutionary America" class I was missing that morning that I was not going to be in class due to a "personal emergency." And he responded with much concern telling me he hoped everything was alright. I still feel bad that I skipped his class, and I was running around like a lunatic, but yeah I guess everything was alright! His compassion didn't go unnoticed.

What followed was a bit of panic, a lot of crying, and so much joy that I was being offered an opportunity to do something I had worked so hard for. I could finally start to let myself see it: what my life could be like in a new state, at a new school, with all new people around me. It felt like a lot of people in my life had confidence in me before I even let myself think about the reality of a success. My brother, again, being one of them. He, being the first person I told, received the full weight of my emotional reaction, and he held my hand and assured me that I would be more than fine. Maizey gifted me a Virginia sweatshirt for Christmas last year which was only 1 month after I had even applied. She told me I couldn't not get in now because it would be awkward (and she was right!), but her gesture, too, felt like an unspoken motion of confidence. I will always remember, too, Izzy shouting at our literal work-place, "UNOFFICIAL IVY! UNOFFICIAL IVY!" after I told her I got in, when I wasn't even sure I, personally, could live up to the title. Her support, all of their support, and their confidence in me is something I will never take for granted.

So many people made the experience of leaving home feel more like a warm hug than a wave goodbye. I am so grateful and fortunate to have had that experience, and it is because of that (and many other things... Brewha, HELLO!) that have me looking forward to moving back home someday. But for now, I know I am supposed to be here. That is not a feeling I have had often, or that has ever been so pronounced in my life. Think of Home as a thing for a second. Not a house or a town but just a thing. That thing that moves around with you on the periphery as you go through life, constantly hovering, but settles sometimes when you meet the right person or read your favorite book. It's not necessarily an "at" feeling - sometimes it's an "in", or a "with", or shit, I mean I guess it's even an "on" sometimes. Home, capital "H" is kind of a thing of its own, and it has expanded inside of me a little bit. I feel it now here, too, in many important ways. As I'm writing this I keep hearing Uhtred of Bebbanburg from The Last Kingdom (who was my Viking boyfriend last summer, thank you for asking) when he says, "destiny is all." K. So, I don't know about destiny, but I do know that I feel Home at school and in my apartment and with my coworkers at the restaurant. I feel it when I drive through town to get to the store and when I walk past the Downtown Mall. I also know that the opportunities afforded to me through this program at UVA and the friendships I have made are things that are adding immeasurable value to my life. And looking back, some of the things that I was forced to leave behind that were not adding value to my life are things that I never would have let go of on my own. I had this nagging feeling from the moment started working on my application that there were things waiting for me in Virginia. And against all sound advice from others, I only applied to one school because in my heart I just knew, in some roundabout way that had nothing to do with academics, that it would all work out.

The path that brought me here was... harrowing, to put it lightly. I'm talking drawn and quartered, turned inside out, disemboweled, and only making it through the year, to quote Aciman: "one slop-infested second after the other." I read a poem recently from a woman online and her first line was: "I have been Good and Pink and Open and Exhaustive." I wish I could find the poem again to link the whole thing, but I was incredibly moved by her words. As I reflected on everything it was clear that her poem was another example of the specific becoming the universal. When I was on that path that ultimately led me here (thank God) I had been reducing myself to being good in all the ways that didn't matter. The reduction surpassed a degree that was exhaustive to the point that it was quite literally draining the life out of me. I had lost myself in it. I made a lot of choices that I am trying to give myself grace for. They are choices that I, at the time, thought were going to yield some sort of benefit or healthy expression of love to someone who was just simply incapable of receiving it. I just didn't know then, but I do now.

It is impossible to overstate the effect that that path had on me, but without those experiences I never would have put myself out there, and I never would have been here. I am trying to no longer let myself access that pain. I have tried to put it away in a corner of my mind and stop myself from digging into it. I was grinding my fucking heels into it before, and it was doing nothing good for me. Living in Charlottesville has been a good thing in that way. Heels are up! There are no physical reminders, I am surrounded by people who know nothing of that past life, and the actual 600 miles of physical distance are finally enough to ease some of the crippling anxiety that seemingly hid around every corner in Indiana. There are times I am still caught off guard by it, the pain. Someone will say a word or move a certain way, I will recognize a familiar cadence in conversation or sometimes surprise myself by verbiage I associate with that time of my life just slipping out because for so long it was natural. And instead of letting the weight settle on me, I try to just let those things glide over the top. Truly, I picture myself just hunkering down and letting them roll off, like drops of water or the blood that runs from a cut. Sometimes I even talk to myself out loud. I shake my head like a crazy woman! And then I tuck them into that corner and just let them be what they are. This goes back to that vulnerability thing... drawing the curtains. And I hope you don't mind.

So, going back a bit, come April of this year I had choices to make about my future, and, by proxy, making the choice to move 9 1/12 hours across the country pretty much decided the rest of them for me. For the first time in 3 years I feel like I am myself again, not wholly, but I am working on it. I am excited for fall again which probably seems like such a small thing to write home about, but I haven't felt excited for fall in a long time. For years it felt like sadness upon more sadness, but now it smells like pumpkin candles again and the leaves changing at Shenandoah, trips to the orchard with my friends, watching American Horror Story, and busting out my favorite turtle necks to wear to class. I can also enjoy music again. Like, I can actually really listen to it and enjoy it the way I used to. There were times I would make the 3 hour drive to Bloomington in pure silence because music had become genuinely nauseating. Either it was too much of a distraction on top of all of the other things I felt I had to worry about or the ideas and words posed some sort of instinctive

danger to that thing I was clinging onto so hard.

Inside Your Mind / The 1975

Take, for example, Matty Healy saying, "The back of your head is at the front of my mind / Soon I'll crack it open just to see what's inside your mind." I would listen to that and feel sick because that's not what I had; that's only what I was unconsciously trying so hard to make myself believe I had. I don't know if that even makes sense because I feel like it's difficult to explain and way oversimplified. Whether it made sense or not, I am just so happy to be listening to and enjoying Bon Iver in the fall again.

Sure, I am facing new challenges here that I didn't have before. But that's normal, they're growing pains. And these challenges are ones that I am excited to work through because I know that in the end, after sitting in the uncomfortability, what awaits me is positive change. So many of the challenges I have faced in the last 3 years, I won't say they were for naught because there has been a lot of growth, but I 100% believe that they are lessons I could have learned elsewhere and more cheaply. But that's neither here nor there, and I am here in the now now now now.

During the first week of class one of my professors told all of us that "grad school is you just learning how to spin your guts." And I knew he wasn't bullshitting. The man's list of publications speaks for itself (when he said it I was sitting next to a framed cover of his book on the wall... in a communal space by the way, not even like it was his own office or classroom) and on top of that, he's a Romanticist - explains where the beautiful metaphor about us being gutted and refashioned came from. I also knew that for my whole life that is what I had been trying to do: spin my guts in a way that mattered to me, if no one else.

Going into the semester I talked to so many people and attended so many orientations that all shared the same key points: Grad school is a marathon, not a sprint. You will never have enough time to do everything. (True!) Comparison will get you nowhere. (Also true!) If you have even a shred of self-awareness you will probably feel like everything you say in class sounds dumb and inarticulate. (Not true, but the experience of it sure is true!) You're going to be challenged to a degree you've never experienced before. And they all emphasized that while we all will undoubtedly feel alone in those struggles some days, everyone else is probably feeling the exact same thing - you just have to talk about it. (I heard a 3rd year this morning talking to a guy in my year about how grad school taught him that chocolate milk is, in fact, a whole meal and sometimes it will be the only meal and you just have to be okay with that. So people are talking about it and I love it.) 4 weeks into the semester and, like I said, all of those insights are ringing true! Every single one of them! And to be perfectly honest with you I am overwhelmed and struggling, doubting myself, and self conscious to the point of paralysis! Okay, maybe the paralysis is a bit of an exaggeration, but I do lose feeling in my arms sometimes when I speak in class so, there's that.

Overall, (to put it delicately!) I would say that my thoughts and feelings reek of imposter syndrome. Which, to be fair, they also told us would probably happen. I just keep going down this rabbit hole of how I got here, and thinking about how the things I know that got me here were all taught to me by other people. So, do I really know them? Or was I just regurgitating the things other people know and spinning them in some way that made me look smart? I've been going round and round, and sometimes when I walk into a room with my peers I am scared that it's written all over my face. Just a big ole sign that spells out my insecurity for all of them to see. It feels like that sometimes. But, in the end, I kind of always just come back to the idea that that is exactly what learning is. All of those people learned the things they know from someone else, too. And if they didn't, like in the case of my personal celebrity Professor Linda Charnes, people teach their students with the intent on passing on the knowledge. I didn't do anything wrong by internalizing it. That is the point of school for God's sake! And, if I didn't have the capability of wielding the knowledge or writing at a graduate level... they simply wouldn't have let me in. They also keep assuring us that the pressure to publish is not something you need to be worrying about 1st year or even by 3rd year for that matter. And not that I even have the intent of being published. Would it be cool? I mean, obviously. But I guess what I'm getting at is that when you publish it's because you have a new idea, an idea that isn't a regurgitation of what you've learned from someone else. It's your own lens and your own culmination of knowledge wielded into a new idea to throw out into the zeitgeist. And that's what we're here to do, develop our own critical lens... key word develop... not have when we get here. *drilling that into my brain* And so the incapability that I guess I'm worried about isn't necessarily a capability I'm even expected to have right now.

I am in a brilliant class centered on James Joyce's Ulysses. It has been the highlight of my semester thus far. There is no way to actually define the book. If I tried to even give an apt description of it on here I know that I would fail. Suffice it to say that the idea people float around about Ulysses being the single greatest work of Western Literature appears, to me (I am ridiculous to even insert myself in this conversation), to be every bit deserved. I am in awe of Joyce and I am incredibly humbled in the face of Ulysses. It will have it's own post so stay tuned for that. But my professor is absolutely magnificent and one of my favorite things about the class is that we are all in the weeds together with this book. I learn just as much from my peers in that class as I do my professor. They are all brilliant and I feel so lucky to be surrounded by so many people who are genuine and kind and offer such valuable perspectives. I am really trying to push myself to perform well in that class. I have never been one to participate much in class. That was something I noticed a lot toward the end of undergrad. It started not to fly toward the end yet, I skimmed by, but here it really doesn't fly because the expectation is (obviously) cranked up a notch (or 1,000 notches) and I am expected to bring something to the table each day. I like that. I don't! But I do. And that has been something that has been a real challenge for me starting the semester. But, it's like Peyton said: "don't be scared to write in it."

The learning curve has been so steep. Considering the level at which I am expected to perform, the quantity, density, and complexity of the readings I am responsible for doing each day, and the work I am expected to generate from my own thoughts and ideas... there is not a lot of breathing room if you know what I mean. Taking it all on at once has been a lot, but it is something I am trying to work through one day at a time... the marathon, if you will. Setting goals for myself and spending extra time preparing for class so that I feel confident in what I have to say has been rewarding. I won't say I am performing at a level I am happy with yet. But, as I mentioned earlier, sometimes I tend to lean on the unattainable end of that spectrum. There is always room for growth and I am really just trying to grit my teeth and do it. It's like that gut drill before the free throw that is supposed to prepare you for the 4th quarter, except the 4th quarter is going to be 2 years long and I am in a perpetual state of running the gut drill to try and make the free throw. And the best part is, all of my friends who I listen to and think, "damn, I am so far behind," all feel the exact same way. They're also running the gut drill. There was nothing more comforting than hearing the friend that I thought had it all figured out look at me and laugh because he felt like he was fumbling through all of the things he was saying in class while I, on the other hand, was sitting there writing them down word for word in my notes. I assured him that outwardly that was not the case, and we bonded over the strenuousness of agency and the weight of responsibility looming over the idea of being a graduate student. The collective struggle that's going on here at least has some camaraderie. We all lift each other up and that 100% feels like solace. It is so nice to know that, despite the uphill climb, we all have, honestly, probably more confidence in each other than we do as separate individuals. I feel like there is something really beautiful in that and it is something I feel very lucky to be a part of.

xoxo Olivia

― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart