DECEMBER 18, 2018:
One of my closest friends (and most trusted therein) told me I should keep this up. I let it slide for a while... for lack of readership, my own lack of interest, as well as the massive levels of anxiety and depression I fit into a single phrase called "crippling lack of self worth," (which, believe it or not, makes the condition sound more liveable than it is).
I'm home now. I think.
I shut my eyes and listen to steady rain against the window and trick myself into being in two places at once: I am in Dublin. It is raining. I am in New York. It is raining. Where am I really, and how can I tell the difference? Does rain sound the same everywhere?
In actuality, I am in New York, and it is raining. I didn't slip into my old life as I'd imagined because there wasn't an old life to slip into. My apartment is gone, many of my friends are away, and the two anchors of my life, which were largely my job and my previous relationship, no longer exist. I'm in my childhood home, which my parents are in the process of moving out of. Selfishly, I'm glad I won't be here for the big day. It has nothing to do with saying goodbye, or sentimentality. In fact, I'm surprised I don't feel more sadness than I do. This makes me wonder if I've built up more calluses than people give me credit for.
JANUARY 10, 2019:
I am in my pajamas, in the dining room, sitting with my mother’s masters thesis. I’ve been saving it all morning like a treat. She is at work, but she left a copy on the table for me. It isn’t bound in fancy leather or anything. It’s just clipped in a plastic bag. I’m listening to my stepdad snore and my dog breathe. Per usual the TV is on, the door to the master bedroom is ajar and I can hear laugh tracks on a sitcom, broken only by afternoon infomercials. This is always a weird time of day. People at work and kids at school. I’m trying not to cry, but I'm also aware that these are my last moments in the house I grew up in...and that will involve a bit of crying. In fact, I want to be acutely aware that I am actually saying goodbye to this place forever, and I'm thanking every inch of it. Every inch there was ever a memory: good, bad or ugly. So if I cry, I cry! I forgive myself for this, as I’ve always been a crier as much as I’ve been a fighter.
One area I could use more training in, however, is forgiving myself. Now is just as good a time as any.
Anyway, I’m not two words into my mom’s paper when I start to see my own habits lift themselves off the page. I recognize me in her (as I often do). We both share a penchant for working puns into academic writing, and there’s an undercurrent of passion in her voice that I feel a deep connection to instantly. Perhaps because I know her so intimately. I, too, get swept up in the passion that simply comes with being a passionate person. You see, the passion is not even about the subject she’s covering. It is this unbridled, utterly mad (yet totally admirable) dogged pursuit of what belongs to her and what she has earned. It’s basically the blood, sweat and tears. It is a passion for what she’s set out to do and achieve. It moves me. I’m reading her work and every single word has a searing edge that says: “I own you. I will slay you.”
At the time she wrote this paper (dated May 2011, during my first year of high school) she’d been through a lot of immeasurably tough and difficult shit. I know she’s not the only person in the world to have endured tragedy, loss and pain, but hers is the story I know best and it’s the story I carry with me wherever I go. It’s the reason I react with rage when my Irish boyfriend says I’m “too intense” for “normal people.” Honestly? He’s probably right. God, I’m so emotionally sensitive. It’s an unjustified intensity, maybe, but it’s borne of who my mother made me to be, and that is someone who feels so fully and so completely but never, ever collapses. So when my Irish boyfriend tells me I’m intense, sometimes I get angry...but other times, I laugh and think, “You don’t know how I got here.” No matter what my reaction reaction is, the frequency with which he says it teaches me to be happy about who I am. If there is a God, I thank Him immeasurably for making me abnormal. Thank God my mother went through everything she did. Thank God the timing was just right for me to quit my job and move to Ireland, even though certain aspects of the experience haven't met my expectations. Thank God for all the shit that prepares me to go back to Ireland and get things done in order to succeed.
So, my mom’s paper. Sort of like my boyfriend: even though the markers may not have known what she’d been through, I do, and it informs the way I read and see everything on the page. I’m in awe of her, though not at all surprised she was able to do this. I’m so incredibly proud to be her daughter. Most people who know me know my mom’s story. She went to school as a widow. She got her masters degree as a non-traditional student (which is to say she was an adult who had a young child to care for, and a full-time job that took up much of her time). I sat in on many of her classes.
I finish her paper, and it’s open-ended. She concedes she has no answers to the question she posited at the start, but reflects that she’s learned a great deal about the way the world moves, and I believe her.
As I prepare for my final few months of graduate school, in this particular moment of packing, collecting and reflecting...in which past, present and future are all rushing together towards a quicksand finish line of my own making, I literally take a look around. I notice a crumpled up fortune I got with Aaron the other day (geez, friend, if you’re reading this, boy did that lo mein look dry).
“Education is the ability to meet life’s situations.”
I have to say, this fortune is second to my all-time favorite, which is the one I got a few months after my suicide attempt in college: “He who does nothing but wait for his ship to come has already missed the boat.”
I’m sorry to all the people I didn’t have an opportunity to see while I was here. I’ll be back soon. Aaron, please don’t feel guilty. I’m so glad I spent my last hours in NYC in a sterile waiting room on Jamaica Avenue. I chose to spend my time that way and it was perfect, mainly because I got to prove you wrong about being sick, but also because it gave me extra time to look at your feverish face and feel nothing but gratitude. That’s my education talking, and it’s not the education I’m supposedly getting 3,000 miles away for way more money than it's worth. I have no regrets about how I’ve spent my time here and now that I’m headed back, I want you and everyone else to know I’m bringing my A game: the intensity the people I love have cultivated in me and encouraged rather than quieted. The determination to see things through and the confidence that I am loved in return.
One area I could use more training in, however, is forgiving myself. Now is just as good a time as any.
Anyway, I’m not two words into my mom’s paper when I start to see my own habits lift themselves off the page. I recognize me in her (as I often do). We both share a penchant for working puns into academic writing, and there’s an undercurrent of passion in her voice that I feel a deep connection to instantly. Perhaps because I know her so intimately. I, too, get swept up in the passion that simply comes with being a passionate person. You see, the passion is not even about the subject she’s covering. It is this unbridled, utterly mad (yet totally admirable) dogged pursuit of what belongs to her and what she has earned. It’s basically the blood, sweat and tears. It is a passion for what she’s set out to do and achieve. It moves me. I’m reading her work and every single word has a searing edge that says: “I own you. I will slay you.”
At the time she wrote this paper (dated May 2011, during my first year of high school) she’d been through a lot of immeasurably tough and difficult shit. I know she’s not the only person in the world to have endured tragedy, loss and pain, but hers is the story I know best and it’s the story I carry with me wherever I go. It’s the reason I react with rage when my Irish boyfriend says I’m “too intense” for “normal people.” Honestly? He’s probably right. God, I’m so emotionally sensitive. It’s an unjustified intensity, maybe, but it’s borne of who my mother made me to be, and that is someone who feels so fully and so completely but never, ever collapses. So when my Irish boyfriend tells me I’m intense, sometimes I get angry...but other times, I laugh and think, “You don’t know how I got here.” No matter what my reaction reaction is, the frequency with which he says it teaches me to be happy about who I am. If there is a God, I thank Him immeasurably for making me abnormal. Thank God my mother went through everything she did. Thank God the timing was just right for me to quit my job and move to Ireland, even though certain aspects of the experience haven't met my expectations. Thank God for all the shit that prepares me to go back to Ireland and get things done in order to succeed.
So, my mom’s paper. Sort of like my boyfriend: even though the markers may not have known what she’d been through, I do, and it informs the way I read and see everything on the page. I’m in awe of her, though not at all surprised she was able to do this. I’m so incredibly proud to be her daughter. Most people who know me know my mom’s story. She went to school as a widow. She got her masters degree as a non-traditional student (which is to say she was an adult who had a young child to care for, and a full-time job that took up much of her time). I sat in on many of her classes.
I finish her paper, and it’s open-ended. She concedes she has no answers to the question she posited at the start, but reflects that she’s learned a great deal about the way the world moves, and I believe her.
As I prepare for my final few months of graduate school, in this particular moment of packing, collecting and reflecting...in which past, present and future are all rushing together towards a quicksand finish line of my own making, I literally take a look around. I notice a crumpled up fortune I got with Aaron the other day (geez, friend, if you’re reading this, boy did that lo mein look dry).
“Education is the ability to meet life’s situations.”
I’m sorry to all the people I didn’t have an opportunity to see while I was here. I’ll be back soon. Aaron, please don’t feel guilty. I’m so glad I spent my last hours in NYC in a sterile waiting room on Jamaica Avenue. I chose to spend my time that way and it was perfect, mainly because I got to prove you wrong about being sick, but also because it gave me extra time to look at your feverish face and feel nothing but gratitude. That’s my education talking, and it’s not the education I’m supposedly getting 3,000 miles away for way more money than it's worth. I have no regrets about how I’ve spent my time here and now that I’m headed back, I want you and everyone else to know I’m bringing my A game: the intensity the people I love have cultivated in me and encouraged rather than quieted. The determination to see things through and the confidence that I am loved in return.