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.