Fucking Around…

THE STORY SO FAR

The prologue of this decision runs so: March was all lions for me, and in that March, however many months ago, I was super duper actually failing a class for the first time ever. A research project that I had fought tooth and nail to fund had exceeded my capacity to manage and was falling apart. After a year of compiling and fiddling and tweaking a portfolio of the work I was most proud of, my MFA applications, one after the other, did not recommend me for admission. And to top it all off, my undergrad thesis was not where I wanted it to be. My pathological perfectionism and my ambitions were burning me from the inside out. I truly felt I was foundering at everything I was good and bad at. Being twenty two, and a dumbass, I thought all of this meant my life was over, doomed to watch my aspirations wash away just as I started to feel comfortable yearning for and reaching out to claim them. And as fellow students found, or cheated, their way to success, I wondered whether my struggles were an indictment on whether going to college was a mistake.

All of this is bullshit, by the way. The ones who know me best—my friends, mentors, and family—are likely scoffing in good spirits at this confession right now. And you know what? They’re right to do so, and in fact I owe a great deal to all those dear people. What’s scoffing now was unwavering assurance that everything would turn out when I admitted that I might’ve blown a gasket, and I had no choice but to have faith that such assurances were well-placed, that they weren’t just being nice, but that they actually meant what they said. None of the above would have ever been life ending, and some of them even turned into astounding successes. I passed my honors thesis with flying colors. I made the greatest academic comeback ever and pulled my failing grade out of its nosedive. I fucking graduated summa cum laude after having my education interrupted by COVID! How many people get to say that?

So while I can speak with the omniscience and humor of hindsight, I am scared at the mistake I almost made because of my own bullshit. And even though I know the preamble to this near-miss inside out, at some point I have to do something about it. Cue the mountainous and island spotted Mediterranean nation of Greece. 

MAMMA MIA! HERE I GO AGAIN!

I don’t know if this is a vice or something more banal, but I am the kind of person who needs distance between myself and the object of my emotional studies. I run away from things. I run away from mice in my dishwasher, from bears in the woods, and especially from places, stacking all my emotional overwhelm like a cairn there because I figured you can’t keep it with you. You have to unburden yourself from the rocks you carry. Looking at this habit more compassionately, charting your life through geographic memory requires distance and simultaneously demands your return. Why make a map otherwise? How else can you know what’s Rockville and what’s worth your roots? 

In any case, with nary a lamb in sight amidst the lions of March, an unanticipated gap year ahead of me, a desire to spite all who gently inquired what exactly I intended to do with my literary studies now, and a need to get out my head, my nomadic tendencies activated. It was time for me to pack my shit and live somewhere else with new people, hit the fucking breaks, and breathe. I started reaching out to hosts on WorkAway, and within three days had confirmed my six week stay on Cephalonia to work at a horse stable. The fun part is that I cannot speak/read/write Greek, and I haven’t seen a horse up close in a decade. I am woefully underqualified, and yet I’m doing it anyways. Oh boy. 

GOALS

I’m going to be approaching my time abroad as one of self-reflection and personal growth, so this isn’t necessarily going to be a traditional travelogue where I document all the wondrous unfamiliar things about a strange place. At least, that won’t be all of it. Instead, I’ll be examining my experiences abroad as a self-enforced displacement in order make myself strange, and in doing do, maybe learn to let go of the perfectionism that nearly drove me to upend my life and betray my own ambitions. I want to learn to embrace shenanigannery, be emphatically nerdy, and insufferably moody too. Pragmatically, I also want to use this as a way to build a writing practice outside of the structure of school, which, I’ll be honest, does make me a bit nervous. I am truly a whore for an external deadline and so far incapable of setting up any kind self-disciplined reward system, so I figured an invisible but ever-present and expectant audience flung about the world is the best chance I have to condition myself into actually putting words down.  

As for what you can expect from me, dear reader, here is a short and incomplete list: 

1. Insight into what it’s like to panic-learn Greek
2. Teaching myself useful farm knots 
3. Various horse pontifications
4. Summer reading book reviews rife with semicolons
5. Amateur considerations made from research that I do to procrastinate my fiction writing

If at least some of that sounds like your bag, please do stick around. Spread the word to other folks who might be interested too! It’s free for the indefinite future! I’m excited to stretch my writing legs (fingers?) beyond typical college writing fare. I hope that my trials are grounding, or even implicating, to some of you, as I try to get off my bullshit.

Talk soon. More to come! 

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