.ꫂ᭪݁ Maintenant / vingt quat ans / Ensuite ᝰ.ᐟ

I.                

Hi hi hi!

Tomorrow is my birthday! I am so excited to be turning 24. I am not a huge believer in new year’s resolutions or the idea that things will magically change after a birthday at the start of a new age, but I do, especially from my current position in life, really like the idea that this me – the person who will be / is a 24 year old, pre-service teacher living in Charlottesville, Virginia – is a version of myself that I am excited to meet.

I have been thinking about the idea of “meeting yourself” a lot recently. Saskia came over tonight and we had a craft night where we cut up a bunch of magazines and made canvas collages that were our sort of vision boards for 2026. I made dinner and we got a sweet treat; there was lots of glitter and ribbons and girly shit and I had so much fun.

I told her that because of where I am at in school right now, I am finally starting to develop who I am as an educator. I told her that one of the things I am most looking forward to about this year is meeting that version of myself and discerning what truly matters most to me and what I want to be the foundation of my future classroom and pedagogy. Sounds incredibly narcissistic when I put it like that, like I’m absorbed wholly in who and what I am. But maybe, now that I think about it, I am that. Not narcissistic, but wholly absorbed in who I am because that’s what it is to be a person. I think the fear of narcissism and my tick to call it out anytime I write something that seems borderline self-exalting comes from the fear of being like the person I grew up around who very much is narcissistic and self-absorbed. That tick, the calling it out, that’s something I actually know how to identify and classify now. It’s a form of respondent conditioning, something involuntary and reactionary. I used to have a lot more of that - like how my arms and legs would go numb when I heard specific words or a tone of voice, but I am working through it. I learned that term from my PBIS textbook that I am reading for my Classroom Behavior and Management class. More to come on that later, but while I am talking about class, I would just like to say that the grand idea that I had in my last post where I was going to give a recap of last semester… I simply just cannot bring myself to do that. Eden told me that it’s like childbirth: now that it’s over my brain is blocking out how truly horrific it was because I have the baby (my grades) and that in order for me to do it all over again my brain is truly just shutting out the gory details. Maybe she’s right; I kind of think she is. But it’s not like any of it is not worth me writing about. Someday I will – a lot of it comes down to having the time to do it. I think it would take me significantly longer than a normal post and it makes my head spin to even think about trying to write about any of that shit without linking every bit of context needed to understand it. So, in light of me postponing that post, as my wrap up of my first semester of grad school I just want to say that I got a tattoo to represent the personal, spiritual, academic, professional, and literary growth, love, pain, hardship, struggle, and clarity that I found last semester in the weeds of Ulysses and in my life in Charlottesville. Molly Bloom ends the novel with a “wholehearted, unequivocal, capital ‘Y’ ‘Yes.’” A yes to life, a yes to love, a yes to her marriage, a yes to herself. My tattoo is my “Yes.” to all of it.

II.              

I didn’t have time to completely finish my thought last night. It became too late and even still my attempt at going to sleep in order to get up for church this morning did not work. I worked all day and it is my birthday now. It’s currently 1:40 am and I am feeling a lot of different emotions. My plans for today include finishing my vision board that Saskia and I started, going to the gym, working on my schoolwork, and then ending the night at a bar down the street with all of my friends from Virginia while I scream like a mad man and we cheer on IU Football in the National Championship. I’m so proud to have gone to IU. I will be wearing my candy stripe overalls and my pin that says “IU Alumni” to the bar later today. Cringe? Maybe. But I’ll use that one Spiderman quote from Flash Thompson: “What’s daddy gonna do? Sue me?” (I miss my brother.)

Since I’ve left Bloomington and especially after moving to a place where people 1. don’t really give a shit about IU, sports or otherwise, and 2. do not embody the same spiritually violent, visceral, animalistic love for basketball, my pride in and nostalgia for Indiana and my time spent at IU has intensified. That makes me sad in a way because it makes me feel a bit like I didn’t appreciate it as I should have when I was there, like I neglected what was in front of me while I had the chance to really be in it and only now that it’s passed I feel how I should have felt all along. I know in my heart that is not true though, I have to remember the rose colored glasses syndrome and give myself a bit of grace. There was a lot going on while I was there. And I did feel it when I was there. I know I did because I remember how much pride I felt when I told my dad that I was sorry, but he was going to have to deal with having one of those “clown pant wearing” IU fans in his family for the rest of his life. I did show up and show out for IU basketball. I can only blame myself so much for not attending many games once I actually sit and consider how impossible it was to secure student tickets and how expensive it was to buy general admission tickets on a part-time Starbucks wage. What didn’t cost me an arm and a leg though was a beer bucket to play Sink the Biz at Nick’s or a water long at Upstairs while me and every other man in the entire bar sported candy stripes and screamed at the TV. I was mostly screaming at Galloway, but they didn’t need to know that. Garrett and I went to our women’s games. The ones we didn’t go to we often watched together on the TV. Seeing Sydney Parrish on campus was like spotting a celebrity to us and I could always count on Garrett to give me a stat by stat breakdown of not only our girls but every other girl in the Big 10. Even aside from sports, I really, truly did make the most of everything my senior year. After Eden left, I was mostly alone, but I found Izzy and other new friends through work and, oui, vous l’avez deviné, French class. We went to Upstairs for Friday afternoon $1 hot dogs and danced at Root Cellar even when it was 106 degrees on the dance floor. I never took for granted my time in the IMU or my beautiful walk to class from my apartment and through the trees to Ballantine – my labyrinth of humanity. Izzy and I went on walks through town and on those quiet spring evenings when it was just beginning to offer a hint of summer we’d go to the IMU and get our peach green tea lemonades (half water of course) or go to Wing Stop after French class and sit on my couch watching YouTube compilations of characters falling in love on TV shows. I would often drive to Griffy and just sit and look at the trees and the lake and when I would go to Verona and it wasn’t super busy I loved being in the small Neo-Classical corner coffee shop on the edge of town. Reflecting on that makes me happy. I am so lucky to have met Izzy and I am also thankful for the rest of my friends at IU, many of which I don’t really talk to all that often but who live in my heart: Maddox, Mallory, Andrew, Jilly, Jalisa, Sierra, Bri, Claire, Molly, Brooklyn, Kalyn, Colleen. Thinking of them now makes me want to cry.  

So much happened in my time at IU. If I were to look back on my life I would truly separate it into two parts right at graduation. Not really a pre and a post anything, but more so a carved up, scattered life severed in a way at graduation from what is now a focused, more full life. I think one of the funny tricks life plays on us, especially in the younger years, is that right as you get good at something and once you figure out how to function in a specific place, role, or environment it often changes right as it settles down. Four years used to seem like a lifetime, but now four years in one place is just enough to feel like I’m standing on two feet. I barely touched my toes to the ground at IU and all of a sudden it was over. One day I was sitting in the sun in the School of Ed’s atrium waiting for my 4:45 class and the next I was sitting in Memorial Stadium watching strangers all around me look out into the crowd with the biggest smiles on their faces as they spotted their families or talked on the phone with their parents and waved ludicrously to try and help them locate where they were at in the sea of black caps and gowns. I cried then on graduation; I think that was an extremely overwhelming moment of Raymond Carver’s human noise. It wasn’t just heartbeats, it was laughter, it was yelling, it was sounds of joy and singing and true bittersweet sadness as people, just like me, realized they would never again be a student at Indiana University. That they had received their last email from the IDS and had climbed the stairs in Ballantine for the last time. That shit will make me cry all over again thinking about it now. I cried a lot on the way back to my apartment from the ceremony, it felt an awful lot like my birthday. People showing up for me and showing me love – some of which I didn’t and still don’t know how to accept – others that I will never, until the day I die, be able to show them or tell them how much they mean to me.

Ballantine - my labyrinth of humanity

It makes me emotional to think about it. That those years I spent in Bloomington and at IU I was often times too engulfed in the external noise to actually be present and feel good within myself. I felt like I was cleaved into, well, not even just two pieces but a lot of different pieces between the ages of 18-23. High school, which meant so much to me in so many different ways, ended without any real closure. COVID stole our last months together and then shortly after graduation the school that held so many of my childhood memories was torn down – sort of a terrible symbolic end to the naivety of childhood. My first year of college was maimed by COVID, I took a gap year (and a half) from December of 2020 until the fall of 2022, my second year back at IU was marked by a mind numbing eating disorder and the beginning of a very unhealthy relationship, the third year was an amalgamation of absolute chaos: my parents’ divorce, crippling anxiety, being cheated on, and my senior year was the year that purged every bad habit that had been instinctually woven into me – every part of me that was familiar with being mistreated and that kept going back to that over and over again was finally killed, but only by ratcheting it up to the highest degree and letting myself get to the lowest point I have ever been to in my life. Only then did I finally realize that I was slowly, by accident but nonetheless, killing myself. Mentally I was doing that. I was a shell of a person. And when I look back at all of that I feel sad. I feel ashamed. I feel guilty that while I was in a place that I loved so much I spent so much time feeling so absolutely awful. I am kind of amazed sometimes that I somehow still performed so well in my classes. Truly I don’t know how that happened. I remember once toward the end of my senior year I wrote an entire paper in the dead of night over Jacques Lacan’s “Mirror Stage” in relation to Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being while I was also, at the same time, typing up a horrific message to send to my ex-boyfriend while I was also intermittently getting sick from anxiety and I was also trying to get ready for class the next day! That shit makes me sick to think about. Those sporadic journal entries I wrote about once, there are a lot from that time. Maybe I’ll post one from about a year ago before it got really ugly. There are a lot of reasons I think that got me to that point. I have a hard time remembering specific details of a lot of it now because since leaving Bloomington I truly have not let myself think about it. It’s too much and it’s too painful. A couple of weeks ago I was with a friend outside of the movie theatre here and he asked me what is one day that sticks out in the last year that was really memorable. There are a lot of those really bad ones unfortunately, one specifically that I spent in front of my windows in my apartment. Just sitting in the sun, writing, listening to my music with the windows open while burning my honeysuckle and vine candle while looking at third street. I recently threw that candle away because the smell makes me sick now.

I guess it’s guilt a little bit, maybe, that I feel when I think back about all of that, but at the same time I was learning. I read about the stages of learning earlier this week; learning begins with acquisition: learning new skills to be able to practice them. I was learning. Learning is synonymous with making mistakes and Lord knows I made enough of them in the last 5 years to last me a while. At the least, I learned a lot of valuable lessons and I learned a hell of a lot about myself. I acquired the experiences needed to see a need for myself to actually develop those skills. The next stage is fluency: being able to put those skills in practice more acutely. I find myself doing this. I am better about boundaries, I am more protective of myself, I actively talk back to the negative thought patterns and approach situations with a level of self-preservation that I previously would have sacrificed for even an ounce of love or approval. I control my life, and I decide what, emotionally, I let affect me. Before I never thought it was a choice; I was at the mercy of literally all emotion, and it came and went and wreaked havoc as it pleased. I say no to things, I say no to myself, and most of all I feel driven and content with what I am spending my time on and the kind of future I am creating for myself. The next stage is maintenance. The maintenance stage of learning focuses on performing said skills over time without a need for reteaching. Funny how maintenance is kind of a homophone with the French maintenant. Homophone is probably not the right word for that, but I’m not a linguist. The French maintenant just means “now.” I’m hoping that my now – my fuller, focused life as a newly 24 year old – will be just that me performing the skills that I have learned and acquired through the last 5 years of growth and hardship without a do-over, without another hard lesson learned, without reteaching.

I know I talked a lot about crying throughout this post. However, I did make it the whole time without actually crying. Now, that could be because its 4 am and I worked an 11 hour shift today so my eyes are sort of perpetually glazed over at the moment anyway, but my bets are on the fact that I will probably cry at some point today. Hopefully it will be because of my drunken state of ecstasy when IU wins later today, but in reality, it will probably be because that’s just what universally happens to us humans on our birthdays. Cry or no cry, I am abundantly full of love and joy and gratitude for my life, my friends, my family, and for God. 24 is a sexy year, baby.

"...writing comes from full engagement of the entire writer, which is developed across many years of a developing self." 

-Linda Adler-Kassner "Naming What We Know"

xx