On knowing.

Most of the time on New Year’s, I wind up making a post about the good things that have happened to me over the course of the year, though it doesn’t often wind up on this blog or shared on Facebook. Most of the time, I wind up making a list of all the positives in my life in some attempt to make the past year feel like it was more good than bad. This is not one of those times (not in its usual form, anyway).

This year, I want to talk about something that happened last week (and some things that happened a long, long time ago).

Around this time twelve years ago (good lord, it’s been twelve years), I had a homemade calendar up in my bedroom (though I can’t remember whether it was hung on the wall or the side of my bunk bed). I was crossing off the days, one by one, in anticipation of something that I’d been begging for: my first riding lesson.

I don’t remember what the date of it was, though you’d think that I would given how important it was to me. All I remember is that we went to a barn and my parents talked to the owner and we set up my first lesson, and all I could do after that was wait. I marked off one day after the next, and I flipped through every horse book I owned (as well as a number of them from both the school and public libraries), and I waited.

I don’t remember much from that first lesson. I remember being asked if I thought the saddle or the bridle went on first (it’s the saddle, friends), and being shown how to catch a horse in the pasture, but I don’t remember much other than that. I don’t remember getting into the saddle (likely because I’d been on a horse before that point thanks to some family members, not that I remember those moments either), and I don’t really remember subsequent lessons either.

I remember being taught what contact is, and spending a lot of time on the lunge line without reins or stirrups (something for which Kim deserves a million thanks—my seat is by no means perfect, but it’s kept me safe through a number of bad moments that could’ve ended with me on the ground if it were worse), but for the most part, things have blurred together. I barely remember my first lesson with Mandy (I’m fairly sure it involved me saying something about how I’d never properly cantered off the lunge line), or exactly when in my riding career it was.

What I do remember is my first ride on that one horse, that night where I walked into the barn and looked at the lesson board and went “Nugget? I have no idea who Nugget is.” I remember going into the arena and asking Mandy, only to be told that he was the palomino in the long aisle with the tack out in front of his stall.

I remember him being a huge pain in the ass in the cross-ties, but still thinking that he was adorable (I have always had and will forever have a soft spot for palominos). I remember needing my dad’s help to get the girth onto the first hole because Nug had a bit of a hay belly. I remember how much work it was just getting him to walk and trot, let alone canter, and I remember expressing to Mandy that I liked him.

She told me that my parents had spoken to her about half-leasing a horse for me—probably Ricky, a massive chestnut Thoroughbred gelding who was fun to ride, but not my favorite. The idea was news to me, and it was exciting—I’d been begging for my own horse for years, after all—but I didn’t want Ricky. I wanted the stubborn, chubby, out-of-shape Quarter Horse that I was sitting on (which probably had more to do with the fact that I’d always wanted a palomino than anything else, but I digress).

Within a couple of weeks, I had him.

It wasn’t easy with him. He was stubborn, and he reared when he was scared, and we had a lot of work to do both on the ground and in the saddle. I went from cantering and jumping full (small) courses to doing nothing but walk/trot work, and when we were finally able to canter for longer than a few strides, I was just focused on getting him to pick up the correct lead, damn it.

He was a sixteen-hand, solid horse, and (at the start) I was five foot two and weighed max a hundred pounds, so there was no forcing him into anything. I would’ve lost that battle in a second. Sure, I carried a dressage whip with me every time I rode, and there were a couple of instances where I really did have to use it (not just the “Hey, listen to my leg” taps that were our standard), but for the most part, it was just patience and more patience.

It was teaching him to trust me. I spent hours with him every week. Our on the ground time was just as, if not more, important as the time I spent in the saddle. I hand-grazed him, groomed him, and would just sit there talking to him on the weekends when my parents would drop me off at the barn for five or six hours. He tried my Doritos and my pretzels and I made sure to bring him a carrot or an apple or a homemade horse cookie every time I saw him. I wasn’t just the person who came out to ride him. I was the person who came out to be with him, and there were a lot of rides where I didn’t ask much more of him than some easy walk/trot/canter around the ring.

He learned to trust me, and in the process of him learning to do that, I was inadvertently learning how to trust him.

I don’t remember many moments with him where I was genuinely scared. Through the rears and the spooks and the refusals and the times when he dumped me on my ass (of which there were multiple), I can only remember two moments of genuine fear, and those were because of my brain getting the better of me, not something that he did. For the most part, I was perfectly content to do whatever with him, because I knew that as long as I did my job, he would do his.

I had multiple rides where I’d flat him and then pop him over a couple of easy fences at the end of our ride, just because. We’d go out into the back pastures and “jump” the tiny logs which were little more than glorified trot poles. It got to the point where we would go out and jump the little gates and logs that we came across as we wound our way around on the trails, just because. Jumping just was with him. Mandy would pop the fences higher and higher in our lessons (though I doubt I ever cleared anything over three feet, if that), and we would go, because I knew that it was going to happen.

I lost that somewhere in the years after him. I lost that sense of knowing, of not questioning myself or what we were doing. I don’t know how much of it is the fact that I wasn’t riding during the years where I was developing a real sense of risk, and how much of it is that I don’t have that same kind of relationship with any of the horses that I ride now, but that feeling was gone.

Flatting was fine—I started with a dressage trainer, and I will never be uncomfortable getting into the saddle and riding (I had a concussion so bad that I don’t remember anything, and I didn’t think twice about getting back into the saddle again once I was cleared, so call me crazy)—but jumping? 

Jumping was a different story.

Tiny fences were—are—whatever. There’s not a lot that can go wrong over a two foot fence, no matter how bad your distance is. It’s when we’re getting to two-six and above that I start having issues.

Now, two feet, six inches really isn’t that high. That was normal for me before, easy, and also something that’s difficult to screw up. I was jumping two foot, nine inch courses at the age of thirteen, no questions asked. At that point in my life, it was unquestioned that I’d be moving up to three feet. I didn’t know if it would be the upcoming summer, or sooner, or later, but I knew it was going to happen (all of this before I had my accident, of course).

That hasn’t been the case in recent years.

Now you set a jump of a reasonable size (read: minimum two-six) in front of me, and it’s somewhere in the range of a forty-five/forty-five/ten percent split whether my brain will go “THERE’S A JUMP ABORT MISSION ABORT MISSION ABORT MISSION,” “There’s a jump, are you sure about this?” or “Oh cool, there’s a jump.”

Usually, even if it’s the first case, I can get myself through it, but those rides aren’t pretty. Those rides are filled with mistakes, and my equitation falling apart, and so many other things, because while I can get myself over the fence, it’s hard to keep everything else together at the same time. I sing Thunder Road to myself (no matter how stressed I am, I will always know all the words to that song) and that helps because it makes me keep breathing and relax a little bit, but it’s never enough to completely shut my brain up.

The second case is usually a bit better. It’s not always pretty, but as long as I remember that two plus two equals more leg and remember to keep my hands up, we go, and we look reasonably okay doing it. I still have to sing Thunder Road sometimes, but I don’t feel like we’re going to stop or I’m going to be taken off with or dumped on my ass at any given moment.

The third case is a rarity, like finding me somewhere on a Friday night other than reading blogging from my bed while my cat snores next to me, or managing to find the perfect pair of boots on the first try, but sometimes it happens, and when it does, it’s glorious.

That case has eluded me a lot in recent years, and has also proven to be immensely frustrating—I took seven months off in 2015, largely because of my inability to find that place in my riding again. I’ve gotten better at dealing with the frustration (it rarely makes me consider quitting anymore, though I’ve thought about it after some spectacularly awful rides (from a psychological perspective, not a physical one)), but it’s been a roadblock for me, and I’m trying to figure out what the solutions are.

One of them, the one that’s my end goal, is to find that horse again. Not Nugget—I don’t know where he is anymore, though I sometimes wish I did, and I have absolutely no desire to replace him in my heart—but I want to find another horse that I click with, where I meet it and say “This is the one” without any hesitation. I want to find another horse that I can build that relationship with, where I can settle into that feeling of knowing every time I get into the saddle, but I know that’s a long way off (two years, at minimum, and probably more like three or four).

Another is to set goals—I still don’t really have the financial means to show at any significant level (or any level at all), and anything outside of the schooling ring in the hunter/jumper world isn’t really my thing (though I’ve learned that I do enjoy schooling shows), but I can find things that I want to do. If the Dom Schramm clinic actually happens in the spring, I can make going to that a goal (though, again, the finances will be interesting). I can make returning to Rolling Rock for another cross-country schooling a goal. I can set attainable goals to work towards, so that when I have another one of those frustrating rides, I’m not going “What’s the point?” but instead reminding myself that there’s something I’m striving for.

A third solution is to keep riding. That sounds obvious, but it’s more complex than just getting into the saddle. Part of it is riding a ton of different horses, to get used to the true push rides and the set-‘em-up-and-leave-‘em-alone rides and the true speed demons so that I feel safe no matter who I’m on, but part of it is trying to have as many rides like the lesson that I had on Monday as I possibly can.

I’ve ridden Solly many times since he first came to the barn, and my first ride on him was within a couple of weeks of his arrival, back when he didn’t understand the concept of “straight” or “quiet,” when we had to circle or halt after every fence. We’ve had good rides and bad rides (and some downright confusing ones) in the year and three-ish months that he’s been with us, but I don’t really remember having a ride like the one we had on Monday.

On Monday, for the first time in a long time, I just knew. We’d had a good jumping lesson a couple of weeks before, too, but I hadn’t felt like this. On Monday, I was able to do that thing Mary always recommends with him and just exist. I found myself in the tack and I knew where every part of my body was. I was able to ride in a half-seat without feeling like I was falling all over the place. I had to think about keeping my hands up, sure, but I was there. I was stable.

I was stable, and every time it was our turn to go, it just happened. We had a couple of sticky spots, but for the most part, things were clean and consistent and I felt good. Yeah, the highest verticals were only two-six, but for the first time in a while, they felt like two-six. They felt easy. They felt simple. They felt like a question I’d been asked a million times before and had a clear answer to, not like some massive obstacle that had been placed in front of me.

We rode some (not remotely perfect) roll-backs, and the footing was sloppy, and those sticky distances weren’t exactly fun, but I stayed with him. I was able to release well enough over most of the fences, and didn’t feel like my eq was falling to pieces, and our ride was good. It was fun. It was a reminder of why it is that I wanted to get into this gods-cursed, money-sucking, life-dominating sport in the first place.

I’ve learned a lot of things from riding over the years, but perhaps the greatest lesson that I will ever learn is to keep going, even when it gets tough. Nugget taught me that sometimes things are steps sideways, not backward—you may not be going forward, but you’re not losing ground either—and that sometimes you have to take a chance on things because it feels like the right thing to do.

These last three and a half years since the end of junior year, when I got back into the saddle for my first real ride since my accident, have reminded me that bad rides do not make you a bad rider, that it can be slow going and there will be moments where you doubt everything, yourself included, but that everything is a learning experience. These last three and a half years have reminded me that I get better as I get stronger, that I will get back to where I was one day and I will go farther than that.

The last three and a half years have given me a best friend that I adore, whom I’ve said things to that I was never able to admit to someone I know in real life, who has laughed with me until our faces hurt and become someone that I am so unquestionably comfortable with that we managed to live together for an entire year without fighting once (Love you, Allie. Movie night soon). The last three and a half years have given me a trainer who has given me so much more support than I probably deserve, even though I know I haven’t always been the easiest person to deal with, and I am so grateful for that.

So as I go into the new year, it’s not with a list of fantastic things that have happened in the last year (though there have been many), or with a focus on the things that worry me (though there are plenty of those, and I do think about them quite a lot, though I try to look at them through a lens of how I can affect change). Instead I’m going into the new year with a focus on what riding has taught me.

I am going to keep working. I am going to keep retraining my brain back into something resembling what it used to be. I am going to keep riding, even when I have days where I question why I’m doing it. I’m going to make a list of goals (both short-term and long-term) to help keep me motivated. I’m going to work outside of the barn to get myself back into shape faster than my rides can (I miss being almost pure muscle, and it’s truly amazing how much my riding has changed in the last year as I’ve gotten stronger). I’m going to keep laughing at my mistakes as much as possible, and do my best to catalog my good rides so that I can look back on them when I’m low on confidence.

I am going to get back to the point where I know every time I get in the saddle. I don’t know if that will happen in the upcoming year, or how long it’s going to take me, but I’m going to make it happen. I owe myself that much after all of this.

(Plus, having my own horse is becoming a tangible thing in a way that it never has before. I graduate in under a year and a half. I’ll need to focus on paying off the loans that I do have and saving some money in the first year (or three), but I’m so close to being self-sufficient, and that means I can finally do that thing I’ve been striving for since I was two. There’s no motivator greater than that.)

As I close this post, I would just like to say a final message to 2016:

It's been real. Now, if you wouldn't mind, fuck off.

2017, allow me to preempt whatever shit you're going to throw at us over the next three hundred and sixty five days (because there's sure to be plenty of it):

Fuck you. I know you have absolutely no control over what's happening in the universe, but please try to be nice.

Until next time x

(Music for the end of the year is as follows: No Surrender, This Year, You'll Be Coming Down)

On recognizing problematic behavior.

(Yesterday morning, my mother told me that I'm gaining a bit of a reputation as a social commentator amongst my extended family. It is only going to get worse, and this post is part of that. I am not sorry.)

We're a month past the United States presidential election.

We're a month past the day when Hillary Clinton won well over the majority of votes that were cast (upwards of 2.6 million more votes now). We're a month past the day when a system which favors poor white states theoretically allowed an orange narcissist with thinner skin than an elementary school kid to be elected to the highest office in the country (I say theoretically because it's not December 19th yet, but I'm not holding out too much hope).

We're a month past the day when the country took it for granted that the Electoral College would abide by the rules laid out for them by certain states, rather than their duty as laid out by Alexander Hamilton, even though it is their job, more than anything else, to prevent a demagogue from taking office.

That's not what I want to talk about here, though. Other people have put it much more eloquently and have much more knowledge of the particulars than I do, so I'll leave the issue of the Electoral College to them. I'm going to stick to looking at things from the perspective of a cultural anthropologist (in training), because that's what I'm good at.

I had a knee-jerk reaction to this election, much like everyone else, and much like many people on my side of the table, my first reaction was "How on earth could people think that a man who spews dangerous, false, hateful rhetoric about so many groups and people is qualified to be president?"

I couldn't get past that for the first few weeks, even as I tried to, so I did the only thing that I could. I stopped thinking about it. I paid attention to articles about appointments, about the fact that promises are already being broken (the swamp is not being drained. It's being filled with a different kind of swamp water, one with little to no legitimate political experience to speak of). I focused on my classes and the story I was working on for NaNoWriMo and the only times I visited the issue of the election were in the context of things that I'd talked about in my anthropology classes that week.

I learned a lot in my human variation class this semester (it should be mentioned that I'm very sad that it's over for a multitude of reasons). I learned a lot about racism, and I learned a lot about cultural constructions of race. One of the questions that we had to ask ourselves over and over again throughout the course was "Are people born racist or does society have to teach them to be that way?"

The resounding answer was that it's society's fault. This is further complicated by the fact that no matter who you are or what you do, you will always maintain prejudices about other people. Racism is so heavily ingrained in our society that even the best of us will never really be free of its impact on our thoughts.

So what does that have to do with the election?

There were two groups out there in the ether after the election. There was the group going "All people who didn't vote for Hillary Clinton are racist and sexist!" and there was the group going "No we're not!"

(And yes, my initial knee-jerk reaction lumped me into the former).

I know people on both sides. Admittedly, most of the people I know fell into the voting-for-Hillary camp, but I also know people who supported the orange narcissist (I can't call him the President-Elect. I can't, and I'm not sorry, because he has not earned that title) (I also know a bunch of people who were third-party voters, and while there is a lot to be said about that, it's a separate issue). I've done my own examination of people's motivation in their voting choices, and read plenty of articles on the subject. Primary motivators aren't my concern.

My main concern is the accusations of racism.

I both agree and disagree with both sides on this argument, and I know that probably sounds odd, but allow me to explain myself: yes, I do think that the people who voted one of the single most unqualified people ever into the highest office in this country are racist (and sexist, but let's worry about the racism for right now), and no, I don't think that most of them even realize that they are that way, hence the "I'm not racist!" response.

There are a lot of different forms of racism, but for right now we're going to focus on two: what many people think of when you say "racist"—that is, the actions of people who are blatantly discriminatory towards people of color—and racism as it so often presents itself—a quiet, nagging sensation in the back of your mind that you don't really notice, even though it's helping to shape everything that you do and say. 

I don't think most of the people who voted for the orange narcissist are proponents of the former type of racism. Most of them probably said and believed that they were voting for him for other reasons. Most of them probably aren't truly terrible people. What they are is shaped by that latter form of racism.

That form of racism is culturally ingrained. That form of racism is something that you learn at home, at school, everywhere, because that form of racism was built along with the society that upholds it. That form of racism is casual, everyday, ignored. 

That form of racism still isn't okay.

As I said a couple of posts ago, not being a racist isn't about what you think about yourself. It's about recognizing the system in which you live and doing what you can to dismantle it. It's about the fact that white people—all white people—are racist to varying degrees, and the fact that society has taught all of us (minority communities included) to be prejudiced against the "other." It's about looking at injustice and trying to do something about it. It's about educating yourself, asking questions, and making yourself uncomfortable in an effort to do better.

Do I believe that most of the people who allowed that man to get this far are blatant racists? No. Do I believe that he only got this far because of the fact that the people who voted for him are complicit in upholding a racist system? Yes.

"I voted for him, but I'm not a racist." Wrong answer. Try again.

"I voted for him, but I don't think that people of color should be worse off than me!" Wrong answer. Try again.

"I voted for him because while I don't think those things are okay, they don't have an impact on me or my day-to-day life, so they aren't deal-breakers for me." Better. Not perfect, but better. That answer is getting a little bit closer to the real issue here.

When I talk about racism in the political system and in the population, I'm not talking about the people who are beating people up, or calling them names, or anything that obvious. I'm talking about the people who looked at a man who has insulted pretty much every group that a person could possibly belong to and went, "Oh, that doesn't do anything to me personally, so he's still okay." I'm talking about knowing that he's said terrible things and not having those things automatically disqualify him from ever holding public office. I'm talking about the fact that, for many people, that was not enough to show that he is unfit to lead this country.

Truth be told, one of the most telling things about the conversation surrounding racism is how people respond to accusations of it. When someone tells you that you're a racist, the answer is not "No I'm not!" The answer is "Yes, you're right. What can I do to unlearn the problematic things that society has taught me?" If your reaction to being accused of racism is to vehemently deny it, that's probably because you know deep down that they're right and you don't like being told that you do things that are harmful to other individuals.

(Please see this video by chescaleigh. There's a lot going on in it which is all very good, but their conversation about the response to accusations of racism is on point.)

I understand having a negative reaction to being told that you're being racist, or sexist, or heteronormative, because I have had those reactions. I like to think that I've grown out of them, because my response to accusations now tends to be something along the lines of shrugging my shoulders and trying to figure out how to avoid doing that thing again, but I know where people are coming from. I also know that the best way to deal with those feelings is not to deny the accusations, but instead to examine why it is that you're reacting so strongly. Look for your own problematic behavior and try to address it, so that the next time you stumble across a post online that says "white people" or "the Straights," you don't need to have such a strong response.

Nobody likes to be told that they're doing problematic things, but I've found that there are some good steps to help you unlearn those things:

1. Recognize your own privilege (for a good definition of privilege, see this other video by chescaleigh).
2. When someone tells you that you're engaging in a problematic behavior, listen. 
3. Listen to people who know better than you do, because their experiences are more significant than your opinion. Again, see the video linked in #1.
4. Educate yourself. Watch channels like chescaleigh's. Follow people who are raising awareness. Read books (you can learn a lot from ethnographers, friends). If you're lucky enough to find people in your personal life who are willing to educate you, make use of those resources too.
5. When you see things that bother you, be they tweets or blog posts or articles or videos, examine why you feel that way. Does someone's general comment about the actions of straight people or white people bother you because you engage in that behavior yourself? If so, what can you do to change it?
6. Remember that nobody is perfect and everyone is going to screw up sometimes. Unlearning these things is not easy and it's doubtful that anyone will ever succeed completely, but trying is always better than ignoring the issue. When you mess up—and you will (I do on a pretty regular basis)—apologize and learn from the experience. 

(In case you didn't notice, most of those steps came straight out of chescaleigh's video, and she put it better than I did.)

Dismantling the system is everyone's responsibility, and electing a massively unqualified person who has said terrible things about pretty much everyone is not the way to do it. 

If you think it is, you have a whole lot of learning left to do.

Until next time, which will be some unspecified later date when I continue my career as an amateur social commentator and make a post about abortion rights. I know I've made plenty on Facebook, but it is physically impossible to say any of these things too many times.

On appearances.

I am twenty years old.

I am twenty years old and I walk into the coffee shop where I spend most of my free time on campus. My friend who is the barista looks up from her spot behind the counter and says "You actually managed to make your makeup look nice for once!" I laugh and tell her "Thank you," because making fun of each other is how we show affection. My hair is a vibrant shade of auburn. My mother helped me dye it yesterday. Nobody knows that it isn't natural once it fades. I am wearing jeans and lace-up boots, a white t-shirt, a blue plaid flannel, a puffy black coat, and a black scarf that I knitted myself.

I am twenty years old and I am almost always put together. I put on mascara and fill in my eyebrows so that they will match my hair every day, no matter how tired I am. I wear outfits that could come straight out of a J. Crew catalog. My closet is stocked with jeans and v-neck t-shirts and oversize sweaters, button-downs and cardigans and Banana Republic pants. I carry a North Face backpack on most days, and a beautiful charcoal purse the other times. The only days that I don't look like I walked straight out of a prep school campus are days when I am too sick to bother.

I am eighteen years old and I am trying to figure out how to adapt my high school wardrobe to college. I buy new pieces of clothing that don't mesh with the rest of my closet, and I try to find some middle ground between the polo shirts and boat shoes of my past and the draping tank tops and sandals of my present. I alternate between doing my hair and makeup as perfectly as I can manage and not doing anything at all. I am caught somewhere between who I was and who I could be.

I am seventeen years old and I am getting dressed for senior prom. I am taking a friend who is a sophomore as my date because he wants to go to prom all four years of high school and no one asked me to go with them. I do my hair and makeup and post a picture of my dress on my Tumblr, telling my followers that it feels like something Elsa would wear. I am wearing last year's shoes and carrying sophomore year's clutch, and I feel beautiful.

I am seventeen years old and I wear some variation on the same outfit to school every day—colorful jeans, lace-up boots, and a sweater or a v-neck t-shirt with a cardigan (or my college quarter-zip, because I know where I'm going even though most of my classmates haven't even finished applying for early decision yet). I do my makeup sometimes and straighten my hair on occasion, but mostly I just braid it and leave it be. I drive myself to school every day and sing along to my playlists at the top of my lungs, regardless of what it looks like to the driver next to me.

I am sixteen years old and I am dress shopping for our spring semi-formal. It is a Sadie Hawkins but I don't ask anyone. I try on multiple dresses, hunt through the clearance racks because it's a little late for winter semi but too early for prom, and eventually stumble upon the dress. Normally I hate bodycon dresses because I am insecure about the ratio of my waist to my hips, but this dress is black and the sleeves are lace and it feels perfect. I buy six-inch silver platform heels that make me 6'3" and I look down on everyone for the first ten minutes of the dance until my feet start hurting and I take my shoes off. 

I am sixteen years old and I have just started dyeing my hair. It is red and it looks natural and it feels like me. Maintaining it for more than a couple of weeks is borderline impossible, so I let it fade and dye it every two to four months. It lightens so much that nobody can see my roots except for me, so what does it matter? It's still redder than it is naturally.

I am fifteen years old and I am going to prom as a sophomore because a friend asked me to go with him. I try on dress after dress, scour the entire mall, and wind up buying the first thing that I tried on. It is cream-colored and looks like something out of Ancient Greece and I love it. I buy matching shoes with flowers on them and get my hair styled professionally for the second time in my life. It won't hold a big curl, but that's fine. I do my own makeup and worry that I am going to break my ankle because I can't walk in heels. My mother comes with me to the house to take pictures and when I walk in, all my friend does is look at me. I worry that I look terrible, but then he hugs me and tells me that I look incredible and I feel validated.

I am fourteen years old and my school wardrobe consists of polo shirts, shorts, a few pairs of pants, and one pair of Sperrys. I cycle through the same outfits and do my best to deny everything about middle school. I am angry and cynical and people don't like me very much. My brother is my best defense at school and I rely on his opinions of the people around me to guide me through my day. I try to learn how to wear a mask as well as he does. He tells the boys' soccer team to keep an eye on me. They don't talk to me, but I know they're watching.

I am thirteen years old and I want so badly to look like all the other girls in my class. They're all friends and they all dress the same way and most of them have known each other since preschool, and I hate them but I want to be like them so that they will like me and I can stop feeling like such an outsider. I cut my hair to just below my shoulders and watch YouTube tutorials on how to put on makeup and count down the days until I can leave that school behind.

I am twenty years old.

I am twenty years old and I know that being tall gives me power in business settings. I have more height in flats than many girls have in four-inch heels. I know how to hold eye contact and shake hands, how to laugh and smile and charm my way through conversations even though I am terrified on the inside because I am still as shy as I was at the age of five. I resent high school and am grateful for it at the same time because it taught me all of these things that my classmates are still learning.

I am twenty years old and I finally understand how intelligent I am, but I still maintain enough self-awareness to never feel like the smartest person in the room. I sail through classes that are supposed to be difficult and struggle in the easy ones because I can't learn if I can't figure out what the point is. I spend weekends reading fifty pages of anthropology articles and sit in a room in the business school for two hours every other Monday to tutor people on the basics of accounting. I am in an honor society and I will be its treasurer come January.

I am twenty years old and my best friends are, for the most part, several years older than me. We talk about politics and science and television shows and they never make me feel like I'm too young for them. They make me laugh constantly and communicate with me through nothing but weird facial expressions and one of them is willing to distract me for upwards of four hours whenever I need to get out of my own head. We have come to an agreement that we're all about twelve years old on the inside (some of us more than others). They go to the museum with me and we hug each other and as much as I pretend to hate the fact that one of my friends is tall enough to make me feel short, it's kind of nice looking up for once. 

I am twenty years old and I am as clumsy as I was at the age of twelve after a five-inch growth spurt took me from 5'2" to 5'7" in a year. My coordination has never caught up with the rest of me, and I roll my ankles on a near-daily basis. I'm so double-jointed that it doesn't matter. I want to learn archery, but I probably won't be able to because my elbows aren't stable enough for me to avoid hurting myself. I knock things off of tables and drop things all the time. It gives other people something to laugh at. I laugh at myself.

I am twenty years old and I understand why people never liked me in middle and high school. I accept some of the blame, because it was partially my fault. I have softened somewhat, am less angry, but I am more intimidating than I used to be. I am learning to wear my height proudly instead of slouching in an attempt to hide. I lift my chin when I am walking on campus and I let other people look at me. People that I went to school with for eight years don't recognize me anymore when they see me on the street, and when I tell my mother, she says "Maybe it's because of how beautiful you are now."

I am twenty years old and I baby my hair as much as I torture it with heat and dye. I promised my mother that I would take care of it in exchange for getting my ears pierced at the age of eight. I have had some variation on the same hairstyle since I was fourteen. I know how to do a four-strand braid, fishtail, Dutch braid without needing to look in the mirror. I cannot fathom cutting more than a couple of inches off because I love my hair. It is a part of me. 

I am twenty years old and some days I look like I stepped out of a rock concert, while other days put me in the middle of a field of wildflowers. I own band t-shirts and pretty dresses and somehow they all fit together into a style that is unquestionably mine. I don't know what the common thread is that ties all of my outfits together, but I'm pretty sure it's the boots. Anytime that I show up in running leggings and a sweatshirt, my friends don't know what to do. It's not normal for me to look like a "regular college student."

I am twenty years old and I am allergic to most types of metal earrings even though I never used to be. I wear the same necklace almost every day and rotate through my small collection of sterling silver studs. I have wanted a second lobe piercing since I was a sophomore in high school, but I don't know if I'll ever get it because I'm terrified of needles and don't know how to deal with my metal allergy in a piercing that is brand new.

I am twenty years old and my Instagram bio defines me as an "Actual human disaster/exhausted college student." It's true, but perhaps less so than it was before. According to my fitness watch, I get more sleep than 85% of people my age. I get my work done on time. I don't have stress spirals with the same frequency that I used to. I eat a reasonably balanced diet and work out on occasion, and there is usually time for me to squeeze in a new episode from one of my favorite shows or a few chapters of whatever book I'm reading before I go to bed. 

I am twenty years old and I listen to The Clash and The Police, U2 and Green Day and The Killers. Bruce Springsteen is my favorite artist. I don't like Taylor Swift anymore. Punk and rock music gets me through my day, except for when it's quiet, and then I listen to what I define as "acoustic" songs. I listen to the soundtrack of The Lord of the Rings films whenever I'm studying or writing papers. Reading about market segmentation is much less boring when it sounds like I'm standing at the gates of Mordor with a sword in my hand.

I am twenty years old and I am pretty. I won a genetic lottery. I am tall and I have nice eyes and freckles and straight teeth (thanks to almost two years of braces) and I can pull off red hair as well as a natural redhead. I am slim without trying and my aunt wanted me to be a model for most of my teenage years. I look in the mirror with makeup on and without it and I like my appearance. I laugh at the in-between stages when I have half of my eye makeup on and look incredibly off-balance. It goes away when I put on some mascara and do my eyebrows.

I am twenty years old and I am opinionated. I am intelligent. I am sarcastic and uncoordinated and I can fall asleep no matter how much caffeine you give me. I write too much and love playing music. I can quote the entirety of The Princess Bride along with the film. Blackadder references make me smile, and around some people I can't help but laugh. I run multiple blogs for no reason other than the simple fact that I can. I drink more cups of tea per day than some people drink in an entire month. I know too much Harry Potter trivia. I collect mugs and candles and I like hanging Christmas lights in my room no matter what season it is. I play video games from the early 2000s even though the graphics are terrible because they have great story lines (and it's incredibly cathartic to slice things up with a scimitar). I have great friends and a wonderful cat and most days are good ones.

I am twenty years old and I love myself, and it's not just because I finally grew into my looks. 

Yes, I'm pretty, but I'm also a hell of a lot more than that.

On racism, tribalism, and privilege.

I'm an anthropology student.

I don't know if it's right to call myself an anthropologist, at least not at this point, but I am a student of the discipline of anthropology. I am a student of the discipline that studies the human species, that has dedicated itself to understanding our past and our present so that we may better-understand the future, the discipline that has been guilty of upholding the same ideas that it now seeks to dismantle—ideas of racism, sexism, androcentrism, ethnocentrism, and any number of other things.

The anthropological discipline is not perfect. It has a long and convoluted history with plenty of issues, and there are still a multitude of disagreements amongst the people within it. There are anthropologists—a significant number of them—who disagree with the ideas that I will outline here, because anthropology is a many-faceted area of study and is filled with people who have a variety of belief systems (and I'm not just talking about religious ones).

A pretty typical area of contention is that of the "lumpers" versus the "splitters." This debate mainly occurs in the study of fossil hominids, and the terms "lumper" and "splitter" are fairly literal names for the beliefs of the people to whom they apply. Lumpers believe that fossils which display a new (or variant) characteristic are not necessarily indicators of a new species—instead, they are variants upon species that may have already been discovered. Splitters believe that every new characteristic defines a new species, rather than being a display of traits that fall within a relevant range for a particular group.

Views on the concept of race can be fairly easily extracted from these ideas—lumpers tend to believe that race is a biologically flawed concept, and that the concept of race is instead a social construct. Splitters tend to believe that there is biological evidence for concepts of race.

The history of anthropology as a discipline favors the latter idea. Early anthropologists sought to explain the superiority of white European lineage, and they used human variation as a way to do it. They measured skull dimensions and created a cephalic index. They looked at height and skin color and facial features, and they supported the concept of a "Great chain of being," with white males sitting at the top, just beneath God and his angels. Under this belief system, indigenous groups were not human. Native Americans and Aboriginal people were animals to be hunted for sport as much as for scientific study. All great technological developments were attributed to the ancestors of the white male population of this planet.

Things have changed since then. Cultural anthropology is now reliant upon the principles of critical cultural relativism and historical particularism (cultural relativism being the idea that all behaviors are equally valid and cannot be judged outside of the context in which they occur, and historical particularism being the idea that each group has its own history of development which cannot be judged against the history of any other group). There has been a development of "feminist anthropology," in which (female) anthropologists have called for the rejection of the notion that all important cultural developments came from men, and tried to teach people not to apply traditional gender roles to the past (just because someone was buried with a sword doesn't mean that they were a man).

Something that has come along with these changes is the rejection of race as a biological concept. As I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, most splitters support race as biology. The lumpers, however, have done what they can to destroy the idea that race is a biological phenomenon, and many of those efforts have culminated in a class that I'm taking right now: Human Variation, subtitle "Race, not racism."

Our class is dedicated to debunking the biological idea of race while simultaneously addressing racism as a cultural act. We spend approximately two hours every Wednesday morning discussing various ideas surrounding the concept of race, and the racist ideas that arise as a result. Most of our discussions can be boiled down to this: Racism exists. Race does not. Ethnicity exists. Race does not.

Biologically (based upon what we've discussed in class), race does not make sense. Biologically, there is not a single trait or genetic marker (that we've found) which differentiates one "race" from another. All traits occur within all groups at varying frequencies. There is more variation as a percentage amongst a single population than there is amongst the human species as a whole.

The problem with race is that groups have different definitions of it. Races are recognized differently depending on where you are. The American concept of various "races" is not applicable in other areas, and there is a very simple explanation for that—race is a cultural construct, not a biological one.

So why does the concept of race exist if there isn't a biological reason for it? Simple. Human beings love the concept of "us" versus "them."

You see it everywhere, not just on a racial level. We love to divide ourselves up—American vs. Canadian (or British, or French, or whatever country you want to pick as long as it's "other"), Christian vs. Muslim, North vs. South, East vs. West, male vs. female (and yes, gender and sex are two different things, but that's a discussion for another time).

How do we protect ourselves? We come up with a list of ways to recognize "us," and then we come up with a way to recognize the other—"them." Loyalty to a tribe is normal—it's a way of maintaining your social group, of recognizing who is safe and who isn't—and we see it across the animal kingdom. It's also problematic.

When you're a wild dog that's part of a group and a different group crosses into your territory, you're going to defend it, because that interaction can be life or death. It can be the difference between having food and going without, between your young surviving or dying, between your survival or someone else's.

Humanity, on the other hand, will survive even if we all look a little bit different. We'll survive even if we all believe slightly different things (provided we don't start killing each other over those beliefs—I'm looking at you, vast majority of human history). We don't need to discriminate against each other this, and yet we do it anyway. Why?

There are a lot of societies that have implemented structural discrimination. There are a lot of societies that have implemented structural discrimination based on gender, skin color, religion, country of origin—you name it, someone's probably been discriminated against because of it. Unfortunately, the United States is one of those societies which has been built on this discrimination—discrimination which has been largely against people of color. Yes, there is a history of discrimination against immigrants of all backgrounds (the Irish, and the Eastern Europeans, and whoever else), but on a structural level, the vast majority of discrimination has taken place against people with non-European backgrounds.

If you are white, you benefit from this discrimination. You benefit from this system. I benefit from it. Whiteness brings with it a level of privilege that other people do not have, and if you're a white, straight, Christian male, then you're even better off than everyone else. You may not believe yourself to be racist, but you take part in a racist system every. single. day. The things you say, the things you do, the things that you believe, are all a part of this system, and unless you recognize that and actively work against it, you are part of the problem.

To every white person out there who is whining about how hurt they are over the fact that people are calling them racist, or homophobic, or xenophobic, or whatever else after the events of the last couple of weeks: what are you doing about it? What are you doing to dismantle a system that favors you over everyone else? What are you doing to recognize your own privilege and use it for the benefit of those who don't have it? What are you doing?

Are you calling out the people in your group who support racism and homophobia and whatever else? Are you trying to dismantle a system of white supremacy? Are you holding your compatriots to the same level of moral decency as you hold your opposition, or are you giving them a free pass because they agree with you on certain things? Are you letting your emotions over being called out get in the way of you doing something to solve the underlying problem?

(And yes, these are all questions that I'm asking myself. I am not exempt from this.)

I can guarantee you that your hurt feelings are nowhere near as bad as the feelings of all of those people who have just witnessed a country tell them that they don't matter (and yes, I know that Secretary Clinton won the popular vote, but the point still stands). Your hurt feelings are nowhere near as bad as the feelings of all of those people who are fearing for their safety, for their livelihood, for the simple recognition of their humanity. Your whiteness is keeping you in a safe little bubble where you get to ignore all of those things, and that is what privilege looks like. Privilege is getting to ignore the very real concerns of other people because the things that they're worried about have no effect on you.

Own your privilege. Own your contributions to a system which gives you benefits and protections that other people have been fighting to achieve for centuries. Own your actions and your words and acknowledge that you're a part of the problem, because that is the only way that any of this is going to get better. The only way that any of this is going to get better is if we actively work to push back against the system which has given us all of this privilege.

The only way that any of this is going to get better is if we own the concept of tribalism, if we take it so far as to make the "us" people who stand for basic human decency and the "them" people who refuse to let go of the privilege that harms so many others, if we recognize all of the things that make us the same rather than the few things that make us different, if we stop making false equivalencies about problematic behavior. Throwing a brick through a window during a protest is not the same thing as stripping rights from people who are different from you, and silence about those things speaks just as much, if not more, than actually saying something does.

I am not perfect. I benefit from this system too. I do things that are part of the problem. I am trying to be better. I am trying to unlearn all of those things that society has taught me. I am trying to believe in humanity above all else, to call out problematic behavior where I see it (and that includes the group in which I reside), to recognize my privilege and use it to make things better, not worse. I have been fortunate enough to have friends who call me out and educate me in the process. I strive to be as patient as they are, even when they have every right to not be. I am trying to learn from them so that I can educate others when they cannot or will not, because it is just as much my responsibility as theirs to try to make this world a better place (if not more so, as my privilege affords me a platform that many of them do not have).

Racism is a cultural construct, and the only way to get rid of it is to change the culture. I will ask you again: what are you doing to help?

(And no, volunteering a couple of times a week does not automatically exempt you from this. Just because you do good work every now and then does not mean that you are not benefiting from a system which privileges you above other people. Your warm fuzzies do not make you not racist or non-problematic. You get to step out of that world and back into your own. Many people do not.)

On seven.

I don’t know how to explain how I’m feeling right now.

I want to cry because I don’t want to cry, because something in me got kicked back into place at some point when I wasn’t paying attention and I no longer feel like I’m breaking, because there is no longer this gaping hole in my chest that I couldn’t seem to fill.

Yesterday was the seven-year anniversary of the accident that absolutely destroyed me, and things have changed so much since then that I don’t know how to describe it anymore.

I started writing because it gave me a way to escape what was going on inside of my head—books helped, but they weren’t enough. I had to build my own worlds, my own stories, where people were strong enough to overcome the things I couldn’t, and that’s still how my writing takes shape. If you look hard enough (though sometimes you don’t have to look very hard at all), you will find a piece of me in every single one of my main characters. You’ll find the pieces of me that I love, but also the pieces of me that I’ve struggled with.

I wrote other people’s stories for so long because I didn’t have the words to write my own. I would try, would piece together fragments at two or three in the morning when I was losing my mind, and it wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t be right. There were no words to capture what I was feeling because what I was feeling was beyond any description. It was anger and sadness and heartbreak and pain and so many other things all rolled into one, night after night, and I struggled endlessly to explain it to myself.

I don’t know if I ever quite managed to do that, to be honest. There are a few times where I think I managed to come close, but there is no way to properly describe what was going on in my head. It was a mess that I didn’t know how to contain, and writing down all of the thoughts that were running rampant was just one attempt on a long list to keep myself from losing it completely.

Somewhere along the way, I found my voice. Somewhere along the way, I found a part of me that I didn’t even know I had, the part that wanted to put words together into something more, and so I wrote. I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, and after what is probably more than a million words, I figured out what I sound like. I figured out what makes my writing mine.

It’s there in everything I do, in my prose, in my analytic work. It’s my voice, down on a page or a screen. It’s the result of all of those attempts to get out of my own head, years and years worth of them.

I spent so long running from my own mind, but somehow I managed to find my way back into it.

I used to be terrified of my own thoughts, of the things that would haunt me at all hours of the night when all I wanted to do was sleep. I used to be terrified of who I was and what I was becoming—everyone in high school who didn’t like me because of my cynicism was nowhere near how much I disliked myself. I didn’t like who I was, but I had no idea how to be anyone else. That pain had become my reality and I clung to it because it was the only thing that I was sure of.

And then one day I talked about it, really talked about it, for the first time. I told a member of the history department, and from then on he was the one I went to every time I was starting to slip a little bit too far. He was the one who never pushed me to do anything that I wasn’t ready for, whose steady support was the thing that made me brave enough to finally get a diagnosis, because he made sure that I knew it was all my choice—all of it.

I started getting a little bit better. Autumn of junior year was my absolute lowest point, the point where it nearly broke me, but then it started to get a little easier. I would go a few days, and then I would lose it again, which doesn’t sound like much except for the fact that before that I was losing it every night.

And then over time, a few days turned into a week, and then a week turned into a few weeks, and then weeks turned into months, and this past year I suddenly realized that I’m not falling apart anymore.

I tried to tell myself that before. I thought that if I told myself that I was all right, then I would be, but that’s not how it works. This year’s realization was different. It wasn’t something I told myself. It just hit me.

I would be lying if I said that I don’t have panic attacks anymore. I had one on Tuesday night, one that sent me into a tailspin that I’m still recovering from, but that panic attack was not about anything personal. I don’t panic over my past anymore. I don’t hurt like I used to.

I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know how much of it was me and how much of it was other people, or when it happened, but I went all day yesterday without feeling like I was dying. I went all day without really thinking about what the day meant, aside from a passing thought here or there. I took one minute to stand in front of my bulletin board so that I could look at the pictures of us, and then I looked at the pictures of me with my friends and family, and at the picture of me with one of the horses at the barn, and I smiled.

I have come so far from who I was. One of my friends loves to point out how much I laugh, mainly because he thinks it’s funny, and I just want to look at him and go “Do you know how much of an improvement this is for me?” 

My history teacher from my sophomore and junior year of high school used to make a joke out of how impassive I constantly was. He would ask me how I was doing and I would never say “good.” If I said “okay,” that was a good day. If I said “okay,” that meant I didn’t feel like I was completely falling apart, and that was an improvement on most moments of my existence. 

I usually wasn’t okay.

I’m okay with who I am now. I’m okay with what I’ve become. I’m okay with the choices that I’ve made, and the things that I’ve faced, and I’ve moved on.

I’ve moved on. I painted my room back in March, and finally succeeded in doing something that I hadn’t been able to do before. I took down my horse’s halters from where they were hanging in plain view and I boxed them up. I boxed them up, and with them I boxed up the anger and the pain and the inability to move forward. 

I still miss him. I will always miss him, because he gave me hope and he taught me patience and he made me strong, but I don’t hurt over him anymore.

Even if I did, I have something now that I didn’t have before. I have friends who have told me, of their own volition, to message them if I’m ever upset and want to talk to someone, no matter what it’s about. I doubt I ever will, because I’ve gotten to be very good at dealing with my problems on my own and I still struggle with reaching out, but the fact remains: I am not alone anymore.

That’s not to say that I ever was before, because I’ve had one person stick with me through this entire adventure and I will owe her for the rest of my life, but it felt that way. It doesn’t any longer.

I’m relearning how to trust people and I feel whole again for the first time in years. Seven has always been my lucky number, and I never had a good reason why, but maybe I do now.

Maybe seven means okay.

On being content.

It's been a lazy weekend, all things considered.

I had a big day on Wednesday this past week—a major presentation in one of my anthropology classes, an internship interview, and an exam in one of my accounting classes—and after that I decided to cut myself a bit of a break since I hadn't really taken one up until this point (nothing longer than a few hours, anyway). The semester has pretty much been go, go, go since it started over a month ago and I need a little bit of breathing room every once in a while.

As a result, I spent the vast majority of the last three days doing pretty much nothing. I curled up in bed and watched a bunch of cheesy movies, binged a little more Brooklyn 99, thought about writing but didn't bother, played some music, and made a trip to the barn yesterday and the park today for a good ride and a pleasant walk, respectively.

I also spent some time flipping through old pictures, and that involved a brief glance at my senior photos. They're only three years old, but it feels like it's been about a million years since they were taken. Things have changed so much—I've changed so much—that they made me pause.

I remember what I went through to get those taken—going shopping to find the perfect sweater, practicing my makeup, hoping that my hair would behave, keeping my fingers crossed that there would still be some leaves left on the trees because it was getting a little late and I really wanted to have an autumnal theme. This is my favorite time of year and I wanted that to be reflected in these photos that were meant to be so significant.

They are, but maybe not in the way that I would've initially expected.

This is my favorite time of year, but it's also the time of year that has repeatedly been the most difficult for me. It's the time of year where I've lost a lot of people, be it because they passed away or because our relationship fell apart, and it's the time of year where I've wound up hurt on multiple levels. Be that as it may, I still love it when the trees start changing and everything begins to feel crisp outside—what can I say? I'm a sweater weather kind of girl.

I've had a really difficult time in October and November on multiple occasions, but there are things about this time of year that I love anyway. In some ways, they help to soften the blow that comes with the things that have hurt me, and looking at my senior photos reminded me of them because those photos remind me of how much things have changed for the better.

Some things about me are still the same. I still love curling up under a blanket with my cat next to me so that I can read or watch a movie or do some writing. I still love making an unnecessarily large number of cups of tea. I still love taking out my guitar and playing the songs that just feel like autumn (though I'm a lot better at most of them than I was three years ago). I still love knitting every time the weather starts to get cold, and I still take way too long to finish all of the projects that I start.

Some things have changed, though.

My room has changed with me a lot over the years. Its walls have gone from white to turquoise to stripes to lilac, and now the paint is grey. My bedding has changed with me too, and now it's fairly simple and accompanied by what is probably one too many throw pillows, something that I used to avoid because they were too cumbersome. There's new furniture and a new configuration, and the things that I have up aren't what they used to be (which is partly a virtue of the fact that I still haven't put my bulletin board back up even though I painted my room in March).

My bookshelves are at the foot of my bed now, where I can see a decent percentage of the books I own and the majority of my mug collection when I'm getting ready to go to sleep. I keep the top shelves stocked with the most significant books from my life—the Harry Potter series, His Dark Materials, The Lord of the Rings, my massive collection of Tamora Pierce novels, It's Kind of a Funny Story, the Artemis Fowl books, and many more. I've got my favorite mugs on display too, the ones that say things like "I know I'm not perfect but so close it scares me" and "Everyone is entitled to my opinion" and "I don't need a therapist, I have a cat" and "So much to do, so few people to do it for me."

The music that I listen to when I'm curled up in bed is different too. It's not Taylor Swift any longer (for reasons that have been outlined in past posts). Now it's more likely to be Matthew Barber or James Bay or Bon Iver or David Gray or the playlist that I made of songs that are largely acoustic. In moments like these I like to stick to things that feel quiet, things that go along with my mood—not sad, not like I used to be, but quiet. Settled.

That's the biggest change, really—me.

I am so much more settled than I used to be. I was listening to my iTunes library on shuffle a couple of weeks ago and I heard a song that I haven't really paid attention to since middle school, and it just left me with this feeling of how much I've changed since then, since high school, since last year even.

I used to feel so insecure within myself, so unworthy of the people around me, like I needed to fold myself down and make myself as small as possible (which probably has something to do with why I still slouch so much). I don't want to do that anymore.

I saw a post on Tumblr once which essentially said "Deciding I was pretty was one of the best things I've ever done for myself—one day I was just like 'I'm pretty' and I was." I don't know if I would say that one day I just decided that I'm pretty, but over the last few years I've realized that I am. I've realized that I'm pretty, that I deserve to surround myself with people who respect who I am, and that I really am as intelligent as all of those people told me I was (these realizations didn't necessarily occur in that order).

I've realized that I don't need to be small anymore.

It was around this time over the last couple of years that a few people shoved their way into my life with "Only I can harass my regulars" and snarky discussions about the business school and the statement "You're both sarcastic assholes, you'll love each other." The group of people that I've collected at school is weird, don't get me wrong. We're all odd in our own special ways, but put us together and it works. I don't know how, I don't know why, but it does. I spend my days laughing now in a way that I never used to.

I didn't plan for these people. I didn't plan for the one who knows how I'm feeling even before I do (which is honestly kind of weird sometimes, but that's fine), or the one whose mere presence is enough to make me laugh no matter how upset I am (something that he makes fun of me for, but it's fine because he makes fun of me for basically everything), or the one who sends me stupid videos when I'm sick and makes weird faces at me all the time (which I gladly reciprocate). They fell into my life (or barged right in, in some cases), and they have filled it with so much happiness that I will never be able to thank them enough (no matter how much they may annoy me, which can be a lot—you guys are fucking weird but I love you).

I don't need to be small anymore because they don't expect me to be. They don't expect me to be quiet, or to be the one who goes along with everyone else just because. They rag on me, but they also know where the line is and they make a point of reminding me of how smart I am on a fairly regular basis. My life doesn't revolve around theirs, and their lives don't revolve around mine. We cross paths, we come and go, and the phrases "I'll see you later" or "I'll text you" actually mean something now. They aren't statements offered up in an attempt to seem friendly—they're the truth.

I don't need to be small anymore because I don't expect myself to be. I've barely scratched the surface of what I'm capable of, that much I know, but things are astronomically different than they were this time three years ago and that's the most important thing.

When I curl up in bed like I did this weekend, I'm no longer doing it because I'm too emotionally dull to face doing anything. Now I'm doing it because I earned a weekend of relaxing, of getting Snapchats from my friends that make me laugh, of making a mental list of things that I want to talk to them about, of laughing when I remember that conversation we had a few weeks ago, of knowing that when I walk into the coffee shop on Monday, I'm going to see at least one of them. I'm doing it because curling up with my cat, a good movie, the scarf I'm working on, my thoughts, and a cup of hot apple cider makes me feel content, and that's what I'm supposed to be, isn't it?

Content is what I'm supposed to be, or so I was told three years ago, and I am (at least most of the time). I'm content with the path I'm on (I think I've finally figured it out, though I'm sure it'll change a bit and I'm going to roll with it every time it does), with the people in my life, with who I've become, with the things that have happened to me, and that's not something that I could say three years ago.

That's not something that I could say a year ago.

I have to say that I'm okay with the way that things have gone.

Peace and love x

(Yeah, yeah, the British one loves to tell me that Americans have ruined cider, but that's his opinion and it's wrong, end of story. Apple cider is delicious and he's in denial.)

(I suppose the point here is this: if Mr. Smith were to ask me that question that he used to ask me every day, the answer would no longer be me shrugging my shoulders. It would be "I'm good.")

On twenty.

Otherwise known as, twenty things learned by the age of twenty || a list:

1. You aren't going to be good at everything immediately, but that doesn't mean that you aren't intelligent. It just means that you take to some things better than others. Work a little bit harder at the things you struggle with and get on with your day.
2. Some people just really, really don't deserve you, and you don't have to be sorry for walking away from anyone who doesn't respect your significance as a human being.
3. Be nice to the people who make your coffee (or tea, or chai lattes, or whatever you order) because at best, they'll become a very good friend, and at worst, they won't burn your milk on purpose.
4. Sometimes pursuing a degree in what you love isn't the best idea. Don't ruin all of your creative outlets by trying to formally educate yourself on them. You'll learn either way. It just might take a little longer.
5. Your favorite musician will change. It might have something to do with the fact that you aren't who you were eight years ago, and it might just be that your tastes have changed. Let it happen. The music will be better anyway.
6. Healthy relationships can be "boring." Just because you don't live a drama-filled life doesn't mean that it's not good enough.
7. Bad things happen to good people, but the world isn't out to get you. Life happens, and sometimes it's going to feel like you've just had one terrible experience after another, but don't forget about the little things that were good in between. 
8. If you can talk to someone for so long that you lose your voice and never run out of things to say, they are one of the most important people in your life and you should remind them of that as often as possible.
9. People are walking contradictions. As much as human beings like to put each other in convenient little boxes, try to resist the urge. Just because someone dresses a certain way doesn't mean that who they are or what they like will fit the stereotypes.
10. Some days you're going to feel like a functional adult and other days you're going to feel like you never stopped being a fifteen-year-old. Just accept it. After all, "no one is ever ready for adulthood."
11. There comes a point when you just have to let things go and forgive people even if they'll never know about it, because being bitter is exhausting and you've moved beyond what they did to you, even if it doesn't always feel that way.
12. You'll meet fantastic people in the most mundane places and they aren't always going to be what you expect. Accept the fact that your group of friends is going to span a decade in age and be linked by nothing more than you in most cases. The fact that you don't hang out with all of them at once doesn't mean that they aren't going to make your life a thousand times better.
13. You're always going to seek people's approval. You'll just reach the point where the people whose approval you seek are actually decent human beings who truly want what's best for you.
14. Trust your gut feelings when it comes to the people around you, because more often than not, they'll be right and you'll save yourself a lot of heartache and disappointment if you just listen to them.
15. It really will be better in the morning. Admittedly, it might take a week for that morning to arrive, but one day you'll wake up and you won't feel so terrible anymore.
16. Tell the people you love that you love them, even if you don't do it verbally. You aren't the only one who needs a reminder sometimes.
17. Who you are is not something that you need to apologize for, and if someone doesn't accept that, you don't need them in your life.
18. You'll outgrow people, but that doesn't mean that their time in your life is any less significant. It just means that your paths went different ways. 
19. You aren't always going to do the right thing. All you can do when you screw up is try your best to fix it, apologize, and move forward. Everyone makes mistakes at some point. They don't define who you are as a human being. Your response to them does.
20. When things feel terrible, remember who loves you. Remember that there are so many people in the world who have, do, or will think you're utterly fantastic (even if you piss them off sometimes). Remember that you aren't doing this alone, no matter how much it may feel that way. Drink some tea, take a deep breath, and go find one of them. They'll make you feel better even if it takes a little while for things to sink in. 

Two decades down, hopefully many more to go.

I'm still not entirely convinced that I'm actually a functional human being, but we'll get there one of these days (I hope).

Until next time x

On commencement.

This past Monday marked two years since I graduated from high school. Is it wrong that I'm measuring that by the fact that this is the first time in my life that the desire to replace my phone, a graduation gift from my parents, has not arisen within two years of owning it?

I graduated two years ago as of Monday, and it feels like a lot longer than that. The college timeline warps things—my sophomore year ended in April. I'm a third of the way through my summer classes. "Last year" doesn't mean freshman year, or high school. It means my second year of college. I'm approximately halfway through my college career, whether I take that extra semester and get that third major or not.

I graduated two years ago as of Monday, and yet there are still parts of high school interwoven through my life. These last two years have been marked by lunch dates at the crepe place on Craig with some of the CMU crowd so that we could catch each other up on our lives—easy, simple conversations that require zero effort on our part because we know each other that well, because we knew each other during the awkward years and we don't have to apologize for anything. 

These years have been marked by the moments that I have on the way to class with people I still adore even though I didn't think that it would be their friendship that would last beyond commencement. These years have been marked by the little inside jokes that still hold weight, by the fact that I can snap someone a picture of a book I'm reading with the phrase "What, ho" underlined and have them know exactly what I'm talking about—the thought of that class still makes me want to laugh until I cry.

These years have been marked by the people that I've gone back to visit, by the fact that Mr. Weiss made me cry when he said he was proud of how far I've come when I stopped by in February (that's why I rushed out, by the way. If I hadn't, I would have been a sobbing mess in the hall outside of the history office. Just thinking about it makes me emotional). These years are marked by the fact that I got a message this past weekend asking if I would be at commencement today, as though there was ever any doubt that I'd be there for the last of my friends. 

With that, though, these years have been marked by other things too.

These years have been marked by the new friends I've made, the ones who take the contradiction that is the person I've become and run with it without hesitation (and give me phrases like "Jolly hockey sticks" to describe my high school classmates, the accuracy of which I cannot put into words). I've made a few missteps on the friends front along the way, but my little group in the corner of that coffee shop has become as close to a family as I think I'll find at college (even without the occasional appearance by my father), and I thank them for giving me something to look forward to every day. They're silly and ridiculous and together we span approximately a decade in age, but they also let me ramble on about what I'm learning—this week it was human sacrifice—and some of them are even capable of out-sarcasming me (something I once thought impossible).

These years have been marked by the fact that I get to learn about things like human sacrifice and prehistoric economies and ritual warfare, the fact that anthropology is now something I do, not just something that I've known for the entirety of my life (and I will talk your ear off about evolution and prehistoric cultural tendencies and the fact that humans aren't as special as we like to pretend we are, so be forewarned). These years have been marked by the fact that finally, finally I feel like I'm doing what I'm meant to—not the business, the business is just an aside—and I have to think but it doesn't feel like work. 

These years have been marked by the friendship that I've forged with my current roommate, who gets it when we have discussions like the one we had on Wednesday night, a friendship built on our ridiculous conversations in her car on the way to horse shows and all of those Saturday morning lessons together and the fact that we can talk for three hours or sit there in silence and be fine either way. These years have been marked by the fact that we both have the same feeling—when we move out at the end of July, we won't be able to replace each other (and we're not going to try)—and the fact that this is the first time I've known someone in real life that I can talk to about the things that have bothered me for so many years and know that they'll understand.

And so I sat there today and I watched the kids that I befriended when they were freshmen and sophomores walk across the stage and get their diplomas, and I remembered what it felt like to see my brick and walk down that ramp and know that I was done. I remembered what it felt like to know that it was over, to know that while there would always be visits, there was no going back, and I remembered how strange that was.

It was the oddest thing, knowing that I was done, that the place that had molded me for four years of my life was no longer mine, and yet... These years have passed faster than I ever thought they would. It feels like it's been longer. I know part of it is just due to getting older—after all, the older you are, the smaller a percentage of your life a year is—but part of me refuses to accept that it's only been two years because as far as I'm concerned, it might as well have been ten. Things have changed so much and so drastically that to go back to who I was the day I got that diploma would be impossible.

That's not to say that I've got it together, because that would be a blatant lie. I'm still making changes and trying to figure out what I want to do and I don't feel ready—though, as the PhD student told me very accurately a few weeks ago, "No one is ever ready for adulthood." 

With that being said, though, I've realized a few things. I've realized that I'm going to wind up back at school at some point in the future, whether it's for an MBA or a PhD or a law degree. I've realized that my love for anthropology is a part of me that I can't ignore—the fact that reading ~100 pages of articles in two days is fun for me proves that. I've realized that my mother was right—the people I get along best with, with a few rare exceptions, are several years older than me at minimum—and I wouldn't have it any other way.

I've realized that for all my insecurities, for all that it's taken me this long to sort myself out and become a person that I'm comfortable being, other people are still struggling with those things themselves. I've realized that all those people I went to school with, all the people who have made me feel small in my life, are just as lost as I was (and still am sometimes) and maybe we really aren't so different after all.

I've realized all of that, and I've realized that the discovery I made over the course of senior year holds true for more than just my senior sage—I will write a million drafts of a million things that I feel the need to say over the course of my life, because things are always changing and I'm always learning something that I feel compelled to share with people. That's why this blog is here, after all.

To my friends who made the walk today: Congratulations. You deserve it. I'm proud of you, especially given what you've told me about the situation since I graduated. Visiting you has been a regular highlight for me and I'll miss knowing you're right there, but don't doubt that I'll stay in touch—every once in a while I need to be reminded of who I used to be and where I came from. You're all absurd, but you're my kind of absurd, and that's the important thing.

Things are going to change for you, and some days it's going to feel like your life is dragging on at a snail's pace, while others will feel like someone hit the fast-forward button—if your experience is anything like mine, it will mostly be the latter. You'll get through it. If there are bad classes, you'll get through them. If there's things you don't understand, just work a little harder, and always remember that Rate My Professor is truly your best friend when you're registering for the semester.

Also remember that I'm only a text or Facebook message or phone call away if you need me, because I'm not going anywhere (and I'm sorry, but you'll always be my underclassmen. There's nothing to be done about that).

I put a portion of one of my favorite poems in a Facebook post after I graduated, but I'm going to leave it for you here too (and then some), because it helped me then and it has helped me since:

"If an eagle gives you a feather, keep it safe.
Remember: that giants sleep too soundly; that
witches are often betrayed by their appetites;
dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always;
hearts can be well-hidden,
and you betray them with your tongue.

Do not be jealous of your sister.
Know that diamonds and roses
are as uncomfortable when they tumble from
one's lips as toads and frogs:
colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.
Remember your name.
Do not lose hope — what you seek will be found.
Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped
to help you in their turn.
Trust dreams.
Trust your heart, and trust your story.
When you come back, return the way you came.
Favors will be returned, debts will be repaid.
Do not forget your manners.
Do not look back.
Ride the wise eagle (you shall not fall).
Ride the silver fish (you will not drown).
Ride the grey wolf (hold tightly to his fur).

There is a worm at the heart of the tower; that is

why it will not stand.

When you reach the little house, the place your

journey started,

you will recognize it, although it will seem

much smaller than you remember.

Walk up the path, and through the garden gate

you never saw before but once.

And then go home. Or make a home.

And rest."

And you know something? That little house is smaller now, but I can still go home, and I've found plenty of new ones along the way.

You will too.

Until next time x