In May of 2012, I graduated from college with the best of friends. Commencement week was a blur of celebrations and nostalgia, toasts to the world we built here together, and a mess of excitement and apprehension about the big What’s Next. We lived off of microwave S’mores, Diet Coke and Jim Beam, and an appalling lack of sleep. Hugging one another, whispering goodbyes, we embarked from college and into our true twenties.

It’s been four years, almost, since that time. It feels like yesterday. Those four years have brought us all our own adventures – for me, graduate school and my first professional job. For all of us, broken plans and new dreams, struggles with life and love and the pursuit of happiness. I am very nearly 27, and I have to ask: How in the world did this happen?

Even now, when I think about the four years that were my high school experience, I remember time moving along with a gentle, reassuring thrum of predictability. Days dragged, months dragged further, and the journey to that diploma felt hard-won.

College was a journey in its own right. Embarking from home, discovering the giants in the sky, figuring out who I was. I remember it went faster than I expected, but it felt manageable. They were four epic years (it was cool to say things were ‘epic’ then), and we had ‘done college right.’

But I never did quite get my feet to the rhythm of the past four years. Grad school ripped by underfoot at a breakneck pace, and it feels like I started this job – this new adventure – mere weeks ago.

A secret to the twenty-something years: Life picks up. The train starts ripping forward, and it pays no mind to the fact that we don’t know what we’re doing. Facebook friends begin families, nostalgia channels start playing the shows we grew up to, and memories of our good college years start to sound like our parents’ stories.

“‘Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks.’ – Yo-Yo Mama

“I’m very passionate about helping people, my significant other, and Batman (maybe not in that order). I’m in love with the  process of improving at yoga, the ideals of self-improvement, and being a mentor to those that will have me. I can rave about thing things I love for days and days; I’m frenzied about the process of gaining more understanding of those things that light my soul on fire. My passion is my flow. I feel beautiful when I’m engaging in the things I’m obsessed with. Passion is one of the two primary emotions that makes me tick.

“‘Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before.’ – Elizabeth Edwards

“Some days passion isn’t there. I wish it always was. I can’t lust after progress every day, even if it involves something I’m always in love with. I’m only human, and humans at their most basic are still complicated. Some days my soul isn’t on fire, and I don’t feel beautiful. Those are the days my energy comes from a fuel that every spirited person should have in reserves: Resilience.

–

“I grind until the day is over. The passion always comes back, but not if I stop moving. Learning about how we as humans hurt each other, arguing with my significant other, watching Batman & Robin. These aren’t things I crave to do every day. My yoga practice will regress, some days I don’t improve, and there are times I don’t have the energy to give to a mentee. I can’t will myself to be to be lustful of the process.. I can be resilient, show up, and still do the work that leads to things I’m passionate about. I always remember in times of need that Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy wouldn’t exist without the worst moments of the 90’s Batman movies. My weakest moments in my relationship create the strongest long-term bonds. Sacrifices must be made to capture the queen on a chessboard. My base emotions can be pawns to a greater cause.

“Resilience is the peanut butter, passion is the jelly, my body is the bread. Resilience holds everything together, passion makes everything sweet and textured, and without my body none of the emotions matter. It all makes for one delicious sandwich, but one component without the others isn’t worth eating. In a world filled so many great sandwiches, eating a shitty sandwich is a great sacrifice.

“Stay passionate. Stay resilient. Keep making a difference.”

– T

A friend of mine once told me, after reading a piece I’d written, that it wasn’t my best work. It might’ve been cathartic, she told me, but it was detached. Unemotional. ‘Your best work,’ she told me, ‘is somewhere between hilarious and heartbreaking.’

The same friend, somebody who has always seen into me a bit more than most people do, recommended that I read Everything Matters!

Continue reading “book club: ‘everything matters!’” →

A little over a week ago, I was in my car listening to a new playlist, and one of them – ‘Hold Each Other’ by A Great Big World – caught my attention about halfway through. The singer, it seemed, was singing about love – and he was using male pronouns. Pressing the track back a bit, I listened more closely:

Everything looks different now
All this time my head was down
He came along and showed me how to let go
I can’t remember where I’m from
All I know is who I’ve become
That our love has just begun like ohhh

Something happens when I hold him
He keeps my heart from getting broken
When the days get short and the nights get a little bit frozen
We hold each other, we hold each other
Continue reading “a song for us.” →

First, let me tell you: This semester, a colleague (Dani) and I have been #blessed with the opportunity to create and instruct an Honors colloquium course through the Ball State Honors College. It’s a bit of a unique gem to the Honors curriculum, but the ‘colloquium’ is essentially a class designed around a topic chosen by the instructor(s), and it should get students thinking and discussing critically. Following the passions we shared, Dani and I constructed a course called The Right to Exist: Social Justice Journeys 2001 to Today.

Continue reading “and i slay.” →

About once every couple of months, I devote the better portion of a morning to building a new playlist. The entire process – scouring the Spotify world for new gems, trying to build the soundtrack to life as is, working to encapsulate it all with the right title – takes a fair amount of time and invigorates me for the days ahead. Not all playlists are created equal, however, as evidenced by the dusty ones at the bottom of the list.

Continue reading “the art of building a playlist.” →

I’ve written before about running as it relates to my weight loss journey, about the first time I stepped onto a treadmill and forced myself through a song. I’ve written about the gradual increase in my running competence, from four minutes on a treadmill to the completion of half-marathons. But, as I realized earlier this week as I was running around the recreation center track, I haven’t truly written out what running does for me.

Habitual runners can agree: Running is (mostly) free therapy. Prior to a run, I often find myself cranky, aimless, and bored; following one, I am usually spirited, motivated, and enthused. Running has helped me sort out more than a few knots, as it enables my mind to wander and reflect at length. But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

Somewhere along the chronology of my life – maybe in the early, awkward middle school years – I stopped feeling ‘at home’ in my body. As I gained weight, ever self-conscious of the rising number on the scale, I began to feel a strange dissonance between the person I was and the person I saw in the mirror. Growing taller, broader, wider, I found myself feeling clumsy and a bit confused.

Beginning at the end of my high school tenure and moving through my undergraduate years, my weight loss journey enabled me to gain some authorship over the state of my body. I came to understand the transactional nature of exercise, of taking time to strengthen and work my body. Grad school marked a bit of a decline for this time, and then moving into the workforce provided me the opportunity to find this authorship again.

When I run today, I am often amazed at how quickly I am compelled to feel ‘at home’ in my body. Running requires that I pay attention to the mechanics of my feet, my ankles. That I notice the sturdiness of my legs, the muscular cut of my calves. That I hold my shoulders in a position both relaxed and upright, keep my stomach and arms engaged. On my best runs, sometimes under summer night skies and others through monotonous laps in the gym, I find myself rolling my head back and forth, spreading my arms like wings to accept the moment. Before and after each run, I stretch, feeling my muscles respond.

I am alive in this body, running reminds me again and again. This body is mine, and I must treat it well, appreciate its strengths, respect its limitations.

What running does for me, I have come to understand, is to bring me back in communion with the body I sometimes forget is my home. It connects me to myself; it breathes life into the vessel.

I’m sitting in a coffeehouse. It is a Tuesday, and I am sitting in my feelings.

A former student, a friend, is missing. He is a leader, a guy with an offbeat brand of humor and a knack for thinking from unusual angles, and he was one of the bright lights in my first year of graduate school. He’s a law student, a dweller of Chicago, a person just stepping into the courage of his story. I’m not eulogizing; I have to believe that he’s okay.

There are four armchairs in this coffeehouse. I am in one of them, tucked back in the corner by the wall separating the people from the machines. There is the whistle of a latte being foamed. In the other three chairs are three older people – two men and a woman – who meet here, I am guessing, on a regular basis. They are discussing current events in their lives and the world. Sharp minds in older bodies. One of them just began a sentence, “The first time I got pneumonia…”

A text message from someone I miss. Checking in about the missing student. ‘I would hug you, but distance, ya know.’

Driving soon, across miles of highway in the dark. Preparing to kick off a new semester.

There are so many uncertainties: Where’s this road go? Is it going to be okay? Are we going to be okay? Does the dust ever settle? Are we better for the choices we’re making?

But there are also absolutes, too: Love survives hardship. Our stories matter. We are here, right now. This is it.

With the jump into 2016, I paused a bit to create a few resolutions. Because my 2015 found me making steps in positive directions, I opted to forego taking wild stabs in new directions, instead creating a list of ‘Resolutions, More or Less’:

MORE:
• Reading
• Running
• Writing

LESS:
• Hustling for approval
• Space for fear/self-doubt

Continue reading “why this blog exists.” →

As an undergrad, I was invited by a mentor to discuss my experiences with masculinity. Walking into the meeting, I expected to feel good about helping a friend with her graduate school work; walking out, I was startled at how busy my mind was. Masculinity, particularly the pressure to perform masculinity, had been a particularly pervasive force in my life.

In grad school, I based my thesis work around the topic of masculinity. My participants seemed equally startled by the volume of messages, of rules and codas, they were working to perform and uphold. So many messages about what ‘real men’ do.

Continue reading “a note on ‘real men’.” →