Purity

You know what I'd rather be doing on a Thursday night? Watching the first female presidential nominee of a major party (though not the first to run for president) give her acceptance speech. What am I actually doing? Watching When Harry Met Sally and sobbing into my Twitter feed. Again.

What led a strong, independent young woman to such a sorry state of affairs? I hear you asking. Well, while the whole story is worth (and has probably been) the plot of a sitcom episode, the short answer is flirting. Intentional, unintentional, begrudgingly offered, misperceived flirting. Or desperately trying not to flirt but ending up doing it anyway. It's difficult to tell.

Oh, and also a perpetual underlying belief that my worthiness is somehow found in both my purity and my potential as a mother. That purity of mine is meant to be in both action and thought, by the way, hence the agonizing over flirtation. If my intentions weren't pure, any innocent conversation is tainted by that undercurrent of what must be unconscionable lust that I should have scourged from my mind long ago. I'm not a teenage boy, after all. Lust isn't an understandable fault in women, much less young women who are far from the throes of puberty. I should have this ish on lockdown already.

It's not that I haven't tried to lock it down though. It's not that I haven't been waiting and waiting for God to put a potential husband in my life. And while I'm waiting, I've done my best to keep myself... chaste? I've removed myself from situations where I thought I might go too far. I police my thoughts. I check my face. I keep my hands to myself. I worry over how much cleavage any given article of clothing shows. I think over and over and over and over and over and over again about how I'm presenting my body and how I think about my body and what others think about my body and what impression I'm giving by existing in my body. I feel in my gut what a disappointment I am when I can't keep my eyes or my words to myself.

On my best days, I recognize that women can be many things, mother and/or engineer, and that I'm not just sitting around waiting for a prince-- I'm looking for a certain spark and I will continue to live my life while that search goes on. All the same, even with all that strength that I'm pretending to, I still feel like it's a bit of scandal when I write about having a crush or having feelings. It's not a new thing for me. I have a whole tag on my college blog for the times when I broke a little under the weight of affections that weren't going anywhere. I present these links not as shameless plugs of previous posts but as evidence (for you and for me) of what might in fact be an obsession in my thought. My default cycle is to deny all feelings until they rupture my heart or to develop feelings for someone I can't have and then to bury myself under the guilt of those feelings. I don't know how to break that cycle. But I am starting to understand where it comes from.

Pre-breakdown on Thursday, I had been talking to a friend about flirting. I was desperately concerned that I was sticking my nose in a place it shouldn't be and sending a guy mixed messages. She told/reminded me that flirting is this whole complex grey area and said, with wonderfully helpful bluntness, that I sometimes mistake talking for flirting. It's okay to have a friendly conversation with a guy. And besides, there is such a thing as innocent flirting. All this brought us back to something we had talked about earlier this week: purity culture.

I know, everything is easier to analyze when you put the word "culture" after it, but my friend sent me this Washington Post article and it's such a great take on the "kissing dating goodbye" movement that my generation of church-goers grew up with because it's not written by someone embittered and single. It removes the gloss of someone who's fallen in faith. As the author says, "On the surface, I am a purity-culture success story: I am a heterosexual woman, a virgin until marriage, now with two small children and a husband I deeply love. We attend church. We believe in God. And yet, for me, the legacy of purity culture is not one of freedom but one of fear." Read the whole thing. She talks through a whole host of issues that I'm not going to cover here but are important to be noted when we're having these discussions over how we should approach love. 

Now, I value my own intelligence and abilities. That's not in question. I've written 15,000 words in a dissertation that I'm immensely proud of, I ran just under 3 miles yesterday, and I've lived on my own in a foreign country for a year and that's just the most recent phase of my life. Almost all those posts I linked to up there combine (sometimes faltering but always present) confidence in myself with the doubts and fears and questions life has placed before me. But even amidst all that girl power, I still feel like my primary purpose in life is to get married and have kids. I feel like I'll only ever be half of a whole until I find someone I want to start a family with. And I feel like any casual interaction I have with a man who isn't going to be that for me is a waste of his time and mine. You can work or volunteer or serve with men, as long as you keep it professional, but that's about it. Interactions outside of those boundaries come with too much temptation.

That's where the worry around flirting comes in. The stakes are so much higher when you phrase every social interaction in terms of "Am I building something here that will last me the rest of my life?" and the guilt is so much greater when the answer to that question is no but you want to continue the relationship anyway. You watch every friendship to be sure that you're not giving any signals or saying anything too untoward or implying via your body posture that you might have even the potential for love in any way other than friendly recompense. Conversations are tightrope walks sixty feet in the air with no safety net and a thousand jeering thoughts as spectators. And so you find yourself in doubt and dread on a Thursday evening, dissecting your words and actions and pulling in every female opinion you can get to assure yourself that you haven't stumbled or caused any of your brothers in Christ to stumble either. It's enough to drive a person to drink.

Listen, I don't want to lay all of my problems at the feet of a couple of "Saving Yourself for Christ" lock-ins. I know that I have a choice in what messages I take to heart and that I have a penchant for the dramatic and the tragic. Of course I would only fall in love with someone I can't have. Of course I would miss the signs of genuine affection. Of course my pride would get in the way of a happy and fulfilling relationship. Of course I would find myself time and again in situations where I can bask in the misery of misplaced feelings. That's always how I steer my ship. It's what I'm good at. And that comes from a variety of cultural sources and an early misreading of Pride and Prejudice and Much Ado About Nothing. Moulin Rouge probably didn't help things either.

But when you pull those cultural planks away, the pointy sticks at the bottom of the pit are still my perceived failure to be pure and my singleness. This should not be. I should not be practiced at patching up puncture wounds and picking out splinters and the church should not be handing me a knife to sharpen the points with. I'm too busy bleeding to build anything like a healthy relationship and you know what, at the core of it, hurts me the most? I've prayed for my future husband more than I've prayed for myself, for my country, for the world, for my friends, for my family. I've held more shouting matches with the ceiling over my loneliness than the problem of evil or the allowance of hate in the world. Every time I come back to God in faithfulness, the discussion ends not with a renewed sense of purpose of the good in the world that can be worked through me but with the overwhelming feeling that I will never be worth anything because I can't be patient in waiting for the right person to come into my life or, worse, that the right person or a person with the potential to be the right person came into my life and I fucked it up somehow. I will never have the house in the suburbs with the 2.5 kids because I'm broken beyond repair and not even worth a minute of God's unlimited time. If God's love is evidenced by God's care for us, how despicably single I am is proof that God must not care for me.

Congratulations, True Love Waits. You've undone the work of salvation with one simple sentence.

No. I don't mean that.

But the constraints that I've built into my life have only been fed by a misunderstanding of romantic relationships rooted in the concept of purity that I took to heart when I was a teenager. I prided myself on my ability to avoid teenage pregnancy and how my heart was never broken by ridiculous relationships that wouldn't matter in the long run. I felt like I was doing the right thing by guarding my heart. But I'm not convinced I was. I've left myself tied at the wrists and wondering why it's so hard to swim.

Still, the clock doesn't really start ticking until you're 36. And I'll know when I've met the person I want to spend the rest of my life with because I'll want the rest of my life to start as soon as possible. Maybe one day I'll be able to frame who I am and who I want to love in terms that are defined neither by the ability of my body to give a man a baby nor romantic speeches made on the tops of buildings on national holidays.

It's a nice dream.

Thoughts and Feelings

When I was a senior in high school, I went for a scholarship day at Carolina where they had one of the students speak and she told the story about how she chose UNC for her undergraduate. She must have been from out of state, because she talked about being in a shop in the airport, mulling over her choices while she shopped. And then, it happened.

"I don't want you to sound superstitious or anything," I remember her saying. "I don't read anything into this. But Carolina in My Mind started playing in that shop and I knew that this was where I was meant to be." And I'm sure we clapped or the alumni and staff clapped and smiled and chuckled because we've all been there as alumni-- a song or a picture or even a cloudless blue sky takes us back to a time in our lives we've painted with the brush of nostalgia to see as so wonderful and formative that it must have been preordained, even if we don't really want to call it that.

I wonder what classes that undergrad had been taking when she wrote that reflection and prepared to speak it in front of a bunch of high schoolers. Philosophy? Maybe something that covered epistemology and phenomenology and materialism and idealism and consciousness. Something in the religious studies department? A literature class? Econ? Or just your regular slew of sciences with a psychology or sociology course thrown in, maybe. It doesn't really matter, I guess, when it comes down to it; there's a feeling of folk religion combined with modern secularism in the anecdote and she'd've had those narratives already in place when she walked into the collegiate setting.

(Goodness, those were a lot of words. My mental monologue is a little pretentious at the moment. At the same time, though I might want to blame the dissertation, I know that I've always had a tendency toward the verbose. One of my favorite things in the universe is the word floccinaucinihilipilification. We were always headed down this path. But man, does a year of masters-level study in the humanities feed the word-dragon down in my spirit.) 

"I don't want to sound superstitious." That stuck out to me as she spoke and I've always wondered why she said it. I picked Carolina for purely practical reasons: they gave me a better scholarship package and it was a good compromise distance from home. I was antsy when I was a high school senior, same way I am now. I wanted to be somewhere new and I never intended to go to school in North Carolina but half of out-of-state tuition at a school in Florida can't compare with a full ride at a school three hours from home, which is still far enough to be independent but not so far that going back for holidays and big events would be too much of a hassle. I'm sure I prayed over the decision, but there was no math there-- Carolina was my best choice and so I went. I assumed this girl was speaking in the same vein: she wanted to assure us that she wasn't just following a flight of fancy in her choice of university. She was being practical. This weird coincidence simply fell in line with her practicality. 

But I don't know her. Maybe she had taken the song in the shop as a sign that she was meant to be at Carolina and she was repeating the narrative because she was going through a rough patch in undergrad, as we all do, and she wasn't feeling very much like she was meant to be anywhere. Maybe this memory was her talisman, her assurance that she wouldn't have been just as happy anywhere else, that that decision meant something important for her life. You do a lot of life-shaping in your late teens and early twenties. Maybe she wanted the assurance from some bigger Something in the Universe that she wasn't screwing that up and that uncertainty came out in this (I swear, it was only like five minutes, why is it stuck in my head today?) talk. Maybe she genuinely didn't think twice about adding in the disclaimer. I don't know her. 

For all the practicality of my decision, though, Carolina was absolutely the place I was supposed to be. I made the most of those years and the opportunities that followed. I fell in love with Chapel Hill. I fell in love with my state. I was always putting off falling in love with much else, but that's probably because it's much easier to love an idea than a person. Ideas let you down, you just re-shape them, or caveat them, or justify them, and suddenly they're as good as new and you can love them all over again. I haven't found that level of malleability in people. Plus, you can't make an idea cry. Only other ideas hurt ideas. And if you think about it, the only thing more dangerous than an idea is a person you've turned into the idea of a person in your head. 

No one sold me on the idea of coming to Edinburgh. I don't even know where the idea came from, to be honest. I don't know where I first heard of this program or when I thought it'd be a good fit for my life. There was certainly nothing practical about the decision. Maybe I had been practical for too long before this year and felt the need to throw some privilege around. Maybe that's why when people talked about me moving to Scotland they talked about me following my dreams. If the decision had seemed reasoned and practical to anyone, it would've been just another stage in my career rather than this romanticized thing. I can fold this year of my life into the story I'm telling myself about where I'm going but I've been good at telling myself stories since I was in preschool. I never told myself a story where I would live down the street from a cathedral and a castle and up the street from a palace and a(n extinct) volcano, though. That bit of my life has been pretty magical. 

I am absolutely superstitious. I've lived through too many ACC basketball seasons to be able to lie to myself about that. The day I drove up to DC last spring to go to an information for the University of Edinburgh, I walked over to the Lincoln Memorial because my car was already parked and why would you read Lincoln's second inaugural address and the Gettysburg address on a computer screen when you have the chance to stand in front of the letters carved into gigantic walls of stone? It's like reading Washington's farewell address. The overwhelming weight of history, the burden of living in times like these, the expectations placed on the American Experiment as it strides and staggers and stumbles forward through the centuries, all of that is chiseled into the memorial, our potential filling in the space the letters leave as they press into the wall. I make a pilgrimage every time I'm in our nation's capital. I can't help it. And on my way back to my car, walking past the Washington monument but not really looking at anything in particular, the moment hit me, a feeling that sits with you like a memory of who you're going to be.

 I knew. 

Charles Kuralt once asked about Carolina, "What is it that binds us to this place like no other?" and the answer to that is not built on some single inexplicable feeling or the swaying power of strings of beautiful moments. It's built on the idea of a public university, the value of people and the things we can create together. I know this about Carolina. I have a deep love for Chapel Hill that I know didn't spring from nothing. But walking down that street in DC, I felt a spark, a recognition, and an assurance. This was where I was meant to be, one day. I'd have the chance to build something here too. 

I feel good about what's coming next, even as I walk the balance between closing out this year and wanting never to leave. One of my new roommates (please dear God let all the paperwork go through this time) just told me that three years goes by so fast and I know that it does. One year flies. I'm tempted to get up with the dawn every day to walk around the city so I can hold it to myself just for a few more days, to jump mentally back to January where the streets were cold but empty and I didn't have to worry about these people who were loving and leaving my town. I understand that I'm going to be gone in two weeks but I get possessive over location. You can't tell me that you're going to love it like I do. 

Last week, I couldn't sleep and so I went out to watch the sunrise from the top of Arthur's Seat. I didn't exactly make it up in time, but what I did see was beautiful. 

Once it was light enough out, I climbed down a path I hadn't been down before, catching new views of that which I thought had become familiar to the point of dismissal.

I can't tell you that the view of the city is any more significant because I've been here a year. I don't know that time equates to affection. I know that I don't want to feel like this was simply my year abroad that I also happened to get a degree out of. How do you know what something means when you're in it? How do you know whether you're meant to be somewhere until you're there? How are we meant to know anything, really?

Well, at least I can take comfort in knowing that's a question worth asking, even if no one really knows how to answer it.

Words, Words, Words

We're going meta here for the moment. Here's a vlog in which I read most of a blog post. (I was a little pressed for time this week and didn't want to spend the hours editing that I would have if I hadn't pulled from a ready-made script.) But I think it's helpful. It's one of the clearest ways I can think of for you to be able to literally hear my voice in the pacing of my composition. And I like that.

Haircut

I call it the Jo March moment. It's that split second when your friend says, "You cut your hair?!" and you get an adrenaline rush from the most correctable of mistakes. It's even better when you cut your own hair (as long as you do it decently) because there's not an option of saying, "You got your hair cut?" No, the praise and blame for this decision lie squarely with you. You've grabbed attention. Enjoy it. 

Hair grows. That's what the practical side of me says. I was ready for a change. I'm always ready for a change. I'm never satisfied with my hair. What I need, really, is a stylist who can craft perfection into my locks, who can perfect the curls or the flip of my hair to match the flawless makeup someone else applies so that my face fits in with the snug yet flattering clothing that someone else has picked out for me. I need a makeover so I know how the mask sets. That way I know how to make the heads turn and how not to. I can be in control of the way I'm looked at. 

I know that betrays a pile of misconceptions about how the world works. The people who care are going to care regardless of how I look. The power that I get from my appearance is only skin deep and has to be backed up with positive character attributes. If I wear a mask, I'm only putting up a barrier that someone else has to get through. There's a truth to the person we are in the morning, without the layers of who we've been during the day. 

But I want to be beautiful by anyone's standard. I want to know that there's not some deficiency for which I'll need to make up. The human race is shallow. There are studies to back that up. I just want to be on the winning side of evolution here. I was never envious in high school. I rejected this game. But damn, do I wish I could change that now. I would sell a portion of my soul for the confidence that well-applied eyeliner and a perfectly-fitting bra bestows, to be assured that no matter what happens today, it will not be my physical appearance placing limitations on what I can achieve. 

Besides, I like the way my eyes look with eyeliner on. I hate how right the magazines are, but I like the way my eyes pop. 

This is the line I walk every time I think that we're properly embodied, that we'd be missing something if we were all just minds interacting with one another. I'd love just being a mind, probably because I'm much more aware of my mental appeal. Then again, there's something to this sensation thing, something profound about being tied to the ground by the parts of you that can see and touch and taste and smell. But along with sensation come all the problems of beauty and perception that are piled on us when we're forced to interact with the forward-facing aspects of another person. Some days I think I could give up the sense of touch if it meant never being judged on how well my jeans fit. All the stuff I like most in the world are things I see and hear anyway. I could be a brain in a jar as long as light and sound information could be transferred back to me. 

Listen, sometimes it's just a haircut. Sometimes it's just a quotidian tidying up around the edges, a maintenance of appearances without a thought to the underlying social norms being upheld. I'm sure I'll land on that understanding of it someday soon. Probably. 

Letter To My Dissertation Supervisor Upon Submitting Two Chapters Three Days Late

Hello!

Please find attached my next two chapters for feedback. Apologies for missing the deadline. I'd tell you that I was waiting on another book from interlibrary loan or that my computer mysteriously crashed or that the analysis of the second thinker reflected so seriously on what I had written on the first thinker that I had to completely rework those three thousand words to more directly parallel these. All of those things are true, but honestly, they're not the reason that these chapters are a little behind schedule.

The reason I didn't finish them on Friday night was that there was a military coup in Turkey and I spent the hours I could have spent working on my citations following the news as it unfolded on Al Jazeera and Twitter. Some early analysis suggested that this might not be so bad of a thing in the long run but the news still captivated me. Then a dear friend let me know that her brother was in Istanbul and I couldn't step away from the updates, hoping that nothing on the streets got too violent.

The reason I didn't finish them during the day on Friday was the terrorist attack in Nice. Luckily no one I knew was harmed or had any friends or family in harm's way, but it was frightening this time around, like the Paris attacks but more real, somehow. It's finally clicked for me that moving to a country (for now) in the European Union means that I will know someone who's hurt when these events happen in Europe. I am tied to this place in a way that I could not have been before. My heart aches and panics and pulls my brain down with it until all I can do is scroll and distract myself with... well, whatever's around, honestly.

I didn't finish the second chapter on Thursday because work from Wednesday had piled up. And because I was busy reading about Donald Trump's choice for Vice President and any and all articles discussing the possibility of a brokered RNC convention, plus a think piece or two on Hilary and Bernie for good measure.

Work from Wednesday had piled up because I was still dealing with the emotional baggage from Tuesday. That one's on me. Also, I went to go see the new Ghostbusters and let me tell you, it was worth it. In a perfect world, it would have been a worthwhile study break, but I don't need to tell you how wrong Leibniz was with that whole "best of all possible worlds" thing.

I was actually really productive on Tuesday. I blocked Twitter and Facebook all day long and got things done. Plus, the events that led to me signing a lease on Friday were coming to a head, so there was a lot of running up and down stairs and scanning things and printing... In a nutshell, there was a variety of matters that claimed my attention this week and some of them involved my life after this dissertation. I think entropy is the real party at fault here.

Monday I wrote. I didn't write about awe and wonder and Sagan and Eddington like I was supposed to, but I spent some time thinking about what it means to be a person in this world and what we have to do if we're going to survive together here. My dissertation has nothing to do with political or practical theology, I know, but I do, and so I had to think through this. I breathe this air, this atmosphere that we've slowly poisoned, and my heart has trouble living here. Leaning into my pain just felt so much more important than whatever else I was supposed to be doing. I did take like twenty pages worth of notes before I gave up and started writing, though, and how was I supposed to know there was going to be a terrorist attack and a military coup on top of the slew of British and American political news that occupied my time? Plus, new carpet and couches in the reception area! You can't expect me to move forward without processing that!

I could trace this back further, cite another incident in America that brought the Black Lives Matter movement back to the fore and then the attacks in Dallas that reminded us how complex our pain is, or that time that I saw the Queen, or how I felt the need to listen to the whole Hamilton soundtrack at least twice because there will never again be a performance with the original broadway cast together and that bittersweetness reminded me of the temporary nature of everything in this life, or how I'm still reeling from the Brexit fallout and (selfishly) the literally hundreds of dollars I lost when the pound tanked.

I know there's a way to talk about all of this without patting myself on the back for being so internationally focused, like my obsession with the news is a good and helpful thing. I know you can get work done and still care for others. There's just a lot here to deal with, on top of moving to a new city, on top of the emotional whirlwind of the last year, on top of the crushing realization that I have like three weeks to "find myself," if that's what I came over here to do. Listen, I'm just as uncomfortable with all of these narratives as you are.

Anyway, all this to say I'm sorry this is a little behind schedule. I hope the day or two you had to wait doesn't impact the feedback time too terribly and I should have the last chapter, along with the introduction and conclusion along to you shortly. Really working through this project has given me plenty of insight about how our world has changed over the past century and it's been an interesting lens to hold up against our view of our fellow human. Hopefully what I submit will reflect that.

As always, thanks so much for your support and I look forward to receiving your feedback!

Best wishes,
Jo

Be Vibrant

On Sunday, I was the only singer in the band for the evening church service.

Everybody calm down. It was fine. There were only like five or six pitchy moments, which averages out to once per song and the keyboard, violin, and guitar players were all fantastic and covered all manner of musical sins. It is easy to sing well when buoyed by the musical talents of others. Plus, I don't know if y'all know this, but Scots sing with verve. It helped that all the songs we played were ones the congregation was familiar with, but still. I'm a Methodist and I've only heard this level of musical enthusiasm from the congregation a couple of times in my life before moving to Scotland. Sing lustily, and with good courage indeed.

While I actively failed to blow anyone away in rehearsal for the summer volunteer band, I sang through each song on Sunday with the smiles and thoughtfulness with which I am accustomed to sing. Years of choir singing kicked in. The Spirit moved. Sometimes the Spirit dived for a sunken pitch and brought it up to where it should be, but mostly, the Spirit settled into that place in my gut where conviction lives. After what feels like years of offering God an eye roll instead of my heart, it was a great comfort to be led to the Lord in sincerity. This I did not expect when I showed up to rehearsal with flute in hand and was asked instead if I'd be singing. I sang and I engaged and I listened and I learned.

This year has taught me to firmly believe that you should not judge a person until you've served with them.

There is life in the church that stretches far beyond Sunday morning. The life that I love, that I value so much in the joyful hearts that I'm drawn to, that peeks through in the hour we spend in church on Sunday, but it finds its stride in the fellowship shared over tea and coffee, in the hours of service spent preparing for and cleaning up after worship, in the bustle of a church office during the week, in gatherings of groups in the evenings, in rehearsals, in service out in the world. This year I have been chained down by questions of doctrine, sectioning off my heart to leave it to fret and flutter over my personal worries alone, while the living, breathing Body of Christ functioned without me. I have to own that. Humbly, painfully, I have to own that.

Church, own this with me.

Own that our life can be overly inwardly-focused and that we have not served the world as we should. Own the questions in our hearts that have kept us from the life that we should have. Own our place as peacemakers, as healers, as those who should act justly, love mercy, and humbly walk with God. In this time of uncertainty and unrest, let us hear the cries of the truly oppressed, let us listen with compassion to the voices we have not really heard before, and let us act. Let us act. Let us feed the hungry and care for the poor and give shelter to the homeless, to the refugee. When the world has used up our strength and we have loved until we are certain that the light in our heart has gone out, let us turn back to God who will surely fill us back up again.

Serve with me.

That's a big ask and I hear it. I know it. I know that treating every human you meet, every human you hear about, every facet of creation that you can imagine as beloved by God and worthy of your attention and service is more than we can handle on our own. Thank God we're never asked to do it alone.

The sermon on Sunday was on John 9, when Jesus heals a blind man and the blind man is called before the Pharisees. Among other things, the passage does a beautiful job of highlighting spiritual blindness.

What have we been blind to?

What are we still blinded by?

What can we do to change this?

Engage. Listen. Learn.

Work for peace and joy.

I don't receive well and I know it. I don't take kindly to gifts given or succor offered. I function best when I act as a reservoir- I'm fed by an outside source but others can take from me and redistribute me and pull from me to bring life to other places. I live in the burble of energy leaving me. Everyone is different, I know, and I understand that we're all gifted in different ways, but for those of us who can, let's bustle. Let's live. Let's be vibrant for those who cannot or so those who can only take will not win the day.

We are so needed.

Impressionism and Olympics

Have a video on this Friday! In this set of Flight of the Vlogyries videos, we've talked about art and what it means and I cannot encourage you enough to check out Joy and Pamela's thoughts on the topic. The next set, which I introduce in this video, will be about our memories of past Olympics and what we're looking forward to in this year's games. Also, a brief cameo by my new tiny Vincent Van Gogh, with whom I expect to adventure in the future! Enjoy!

Ain't No Man

A couple of months ago, I switched the background on my computer to pictures of my friends and family and me. I went through my facebook photos and I downloaded and saved group shots from as early as freshman year of college, bringing to mind the people that I left on the other side of the ocean. I put it all on a rotation so I see full-sized pictures of the mellophone section or the seniors from my last year in SAI or work-friends from work-excursions. Don't worry, I also have group photos from this year in the rotation. I made friends and had fun and stuff. I know you were worried.

There's a balance in life that you have to maintain, I think. It's the balance between what you and other people think and what you know to be true. It's a semipermeable membrane. Not everything is going to get in and not everything is able to leave. And I know that I live in my head and so I consider carefully the people who are able to give me ideas in the first place but I'm frequently surprised by what I see as the outsized impact my friends and situations have had on shaping me. It's the typical mix of good and bad that you get with humanity, but weighted, I feel, heavily towards the good. The memories I have on my computer are good, with one or two bittersweet. But I've had enough time to tease out the things I carry with me and where I picked them up from. The good thing about a year abroad in academia is you have a lot of time for your thoughts and a lot of perspective from which to view them.

At the same time, I feel strongly, deeply that there is an incorruptible part of me that no one gets to shape and that part of me is exuberance, joy, and some kind of love. The casing might get dented, but that's not going to break me. I might believe the lies that have been given to me, the ones that I tell myself about who I am and who I can be and what I am worth, but the most they can do is to cover up that core of who I am. Eventually, I'm going to burn through them. I'm only sorry that it's taken me so long.

There's a vanity in me too, that longs to say pretty things and hold intelligent, indispensable opinions and direct people in the spirit of those lovely words and worthy thoughts. It's a privilege of position. But the way we combat this vanity is with others. You realize that the bit of you that you hold to be true is surrounded by a sea of humanity, some of which batters you out of defense of their own cores, some of which holds you and builds you up and maintains you when you could not or in ways that you did not expect.

I guess what I'm saying is that I found myself and I found out that I wasn't alone all at the same time. It's kinda a lot and I'm still dealing. But at least I know I'm not the only one who's felt all this before.

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; 
every man is a peece of the Continent, 
a part of the maine; 
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, 
Europe is the lesse, 
as well as if a Promontorie were, 
as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; 
any mans death diminishes me, 
because I am involved in Mankinde; 
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 
It tolls for thee.