once the vessel cracks open

 "...But we’re not different sprouts from the same plant. I can’t be you; you can’t be me. You can imagine another well, but never quite perfectly, you know?"

For a week in the middle of the summer I traipsed through the hallways of a Navajo boarding school, through the red dirt roads of the Arizona desert, through conversation after conversation with highschooler and adult alike.  Each day I woke up early, drenched myself in icy water spitting from a faucet that scarcely came up to my shoulderblades, dressed myself in outdated jeans and a t-shirt, and walked into the cafeteria where dozens of little Navajo children ate breakfast each morning of the school year.  Each day, a hundred large brown paper bags, the type you use to pack lunch for not just one person, but three, covered the entire wall to my left.

Each bore the name of one person on our trip, some decorated simply, elaborately, intricately, humorously.  Some featured cacti with their arms outstretched, suns dancing across the brown canvas, rock formations sprouting happily from the earth.  Some made mention of a silly nom de plume, others reminded me to whom they belonged with a simple handwritten first name.

I found myself observing this wall every time I entered the cafeteria.  Each bag was so different; each told a story about the person who created it, just like the notes we would write to each other would.  Our task was simple: write kind words that would make someone feel warm and fuzzy, the feelings after which these notes came to be called.  We would write these warm and fuzzies throughout the week and deliver them to their respective paper bag homes.  At the end of our trip, we would untape our bag from the wall, dump out the pile of notes that had accumulated, and learn about ourselves through the words that others had written about us.

Throughout the week, I contemplated my notes to others.  More so than the two years before, I found myself realizing that writing these warm and fuzzies was truly the method of communication at which I could excel.  I found thoughts about people pouring into my brain from all directions, nice things to say accumulating with incredible speed.

Although I did not have a momentous event in my life to reveal to the group during our nighttime devotions, although I did not have a secret that I didn't even realize I was itching to reveal, more than anything else on the trip, I found myself obsessing over these written notes.  What I certainly could have thought of as a simple way to uplift someone's spirits by telling them that they had a lovely personality turned into this incredible project for me to undertake, propelled forth by this sudden desire, this sudden hunger to make people feel this warmth, this fuzziness using all the power that I had -- words.

I guess it's something that I always come back to, but it's true: the greatest power that I possessed was my ability to use words to dictate my thoughts.  I imagined the feeling that would overcome me if I received a note detailing the ways in which I had affected somebody's life, the tiny things they admired about me that I didn't even notice in myself.  From this imagination sprung my insatiable hunger to make people feel those same emotions.

I wrote and I wrote, about everything I loved and admired in people, about the ways in which they changed my life.  I put so much painstaking effort into trying to ensure that each person I wrote to understood the value and importance of their life in my own and in others', and I guess I didn't realize that the entire time I did so, I was hoping, praying that someone would write the same kind of note for me.  Selfish as it was, I suppose it was true -- I told people the things that I would appreciate hearing more than anything in the world, poured every one of my thoughts out in order to show each person exactly the things I would have liked to hear.

photo via grace brown ;)

Among my own warm and fuzzies, I received only a few that reached the level of personal depth that I attempted to put into the ones I wrote for others.  I would certainly not call it disappointment that filled me -- hearing any nice thing about yourself is enough to warm your stomach -- but I don't know how else to describe it. I wasn't disappointed because of what people had said about me, I was disappointed because of what people hadn't said.  I guess I just wanted to know that my existence made somebody, anybody, feel something.  But then something else was happening, something that made me feel warmer and fuzzier than any of the notes to me did.  A few people approached me after reading my notes, thanking me for putting so much thought into them -- and I wanted to leap for joy.

I have been thinking about it recently, and I have realized that I am not the type of person who would be able to approach someone to thank them for a handwritten note -- I am the person who would write this elaborate thank-you.  I have realized that words are the realm in which I know I am comfortable, and that others use other means to show other people their thoughts, like their actions or their voices.

Mostly, though, I have had to realize and accept that not everybody is me.  Not everybody communicates in the same way that I do, and not everybody will even be able to appreciate this method in the way that I hope they do.  I suppose what all of this really means is that I need to do things the way I can, show people how I feel using the tools that I am given, and accept with open arms the different ways in which others communicate.  We can never truly be one another, but we should try our best to understand in whichever way we know how.

i'm feeling so much righter now

"A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.
To live is to be slowly born."

-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Last night, instead of blogging, I sat with my parents on their bed and watched myself grow up.  Two heavy photo albums sat at the foot of the bed as I hungrily turned the pages of whichever third one remained sitting in my lap.  The first one chronicled my life from the womb to my first birthday, the second lasted until Daria was born, and the third the first few years of my life with a sister.

As I turned each page, experienced the first months of my existence, I watched my parents.  In the beginning, when my dark-haired dad would wear UC baseball caps and t-shirts, I saw in him these flashes of unparalleled youth -- he was practically a college student, a baby.  Perhaps it was just his youth juxtaposed next to seventeen years later, but I found myself realizing that I am closer to my parents' age when they had me than they are now.

I thought about the seamlessness with which I have grown.  I turned the pages of each photo album, and I went from a squishy, nondescript newborn to a little bald infant with blue eyes that would soon turn green.  My body slowly grew to match the size of my head, which had sprouted white-blond hair, and I lost some of the baby fat that padded the falls that I soon would learn to eliminate from my everyday toddling.  But in none of the pictures did I see a dramatic leap from one stage of my life to the other.  Only when I flipped backwards a few pages at a time did I even witness a noticeable change.

I guess it's the same with picking out the pictures from middle school that will go in our end-of-the-year senior video.  I look at my seventh grade self, awkward and gangly, with dirty blond hair, long and limp, and an overbite that seemed only to exist to accentuate my awkwardness.  I look at these pictures, and I can scarcely believe how immature, how lame I was.  And yet I remember in vivid detail the first day I hung out with my best friend, our eighth grade trip to Chicago, my sixth grade overnight trip to Camp Kern.  I remember being this person, and I remember doing things, and I remember thinking that I was as mature as I could possibly be.  And yet every year, I would look back on the year before, thinking about how weird I was, about how I lacked the social graces that everyone seemed to possess.

Perhaps becoming mature isn't being all-knowing and understanding social situations and not embarrassing yourself.  Perhaps being mature is simply accepting the fact that there is always, always somewhere to go.  Even if things are bad, they will get better.  And even if I am feeling like I could not be cooler, I will probably look back on myself in two years and realize that I am far from it.  Maybe I should focus less on maturity now, and focus more on being the person that I am constantly becoming.

"Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself."

when the light pressed up against your shoulderblade

I didn't post yesterday again, but I almost had a reason for that -- after school, I had swimming until 5:30, then lifted until 6:30, then did calculus and made my mom a birthday card and wrapped her present while she and my dad were at my sister's concert, then hung out with my parents.

I found myself kicking myself when I remembered that I had forgotten to write again yesterday, but then I gave it some thought.  Maybe my isearch isn't about forcing myself to do something -- maybe it is about learning to develop new habits.  And I think that on certain days, if I can't get around to writing because I am spending time with my family, that is not necessarily a bad thing.  I have been thinking a lot lately and I am going to be leaving the house soon -- I am going to be alone, on my own.  Because I will be seventeen when I graduate, I don't have that extra year of life within the walls of my parents' home.  I ought to spend time with my parents because honestly, this is the last December 9th I will ever probably be home for.

I am exhausted and I have dryland, swim practice, and a swim meet tomorrow.  The amount of swimming in my life is nothing less than excessive, but I keep getting yelled at by my coach, who asks me if I am going to "complain about swimming when I'm in college".  But I don't think it's really me being lazy -- it's more just me being burnt out and ready to move on.  And I am -- I'm ready to move on.  I want to succeed this season, but I'm ready for some new scenery (and not to mention never swimming in that god damn pool ever again).

This is an awful post completely void of insight so I am going to keep it short and go read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao for the second time.  I think forgetting novels is a lovely thing -- if you wait long enough in between the times that you read them, you can almost forget the little details and nuances that made you fall in love with it.  And then you can fall in love all over again.

Goodnight!

locomotion

I have been going to bed at not-so-obscene hours lately, yet I have still been struggling against the incredible urge to dismiss my alarm clock and go back to sleep every morning this week.  It's weird, I have gotten so good at waking up on my own, but this week, I have regressed so much.  Maybe it's because it's so cold outside and my bed is so warm, or because it is pitch black outside at 6:15 in the morning as if it were like, 2 AM or something, or maybe it's just because the wear and tear of school and swimming has started to really take hold on me.

I can only hope that I am not running out of steam exactly one week before exams... I know that I need a break, but I can't afford to take one yet! And even when winter break starts, it's not like I'm going to have an easy life by any means... Christmas training is looming overhead, and the thought of practicing in that minuscule pool where the air is thick and hard to breathe and there are waves like the ocean frankly makes me wish that school would continue over the holidays.  That, my friends, is how difficult my winter break is.

But I digress.  I can't be losing steam right now because I truly do need it to do well on my exams.  The last high school exams I will ever take... And I need to get good grades because I can't let my first semester senior year unflatter me... mehhhh.

I guess I thought that this post was going to be somewhat better than my one this morning, but I have been doing a lot of conversing and thinking as opposed to writing today, and I am feeling particularly ineloquent (perhaps I have wasted my writing innovation on the remains of my college essays..?).  So these are boring posts with no audience in mind, which believe me, I hate to do.  Today I was writing down things that I have observed since starting my blog, like a little progress report for my isearch paper, and I actually thought of a lot of things to write down.  Hopefully this kind of post doesn't turn people off from reading this, because I will need your help if you have ever at any point read my blog!

My calculus answers are submitted to blackboard, my gov vocab quiz is going to remain un-studied for, and I am managing to squeeze by in every class by turning in work slightly late.  Holding on by the skin of my teeth, but what else is new...? It is time for me to sleep, so that overwhelming urge to dismiss my alarm as the boy who cried Wolf does not hit me so hard when I wake up.

P.S. Because I don't like to submit posts without images, more senior pictures by Julia ! Yay!

photo by julia carleton

a whole team

Forgot to post again last night... I am a terrible person.  As punishment, I am making myself write twice today even though I have a busy day ahead of me -- but Wednesday nights always get me thinking, so who knows if that will even be difficult.

Yesterday was my first high school swim meet of the season.  We were up against two very small teams, so it wasn't a great opportunity to see the big competition for the year, but I still had fun nonetheless.  I found myself sitting on the bleachers next to a freshman and realizing that I knew everybody on the team because they were all younger than me.  Well, that is not entirely true, seeing as I don't know personally every one of the class of 2014 (and I am still sixteen and therefore half of the junior class is older than me), but in theory, I know everybody.  And in theory, everybody knows me.

It was weird.  Because I remember the relationship I had with my senior class when I was a freshman, and it was certainly less than personal (with the exception of a few kids on my club team).  It was more of an admiration from afar, but I was even a club swimmer, doing well in meets, so I shouldn't have even been flying so far under the radar.  I stayed out of sight and out of mind, basically, save for maybe the few people who traveled to districts and state.

I know I keep saying stuff like this, but I don't want to be that.  I want to know these people.  I want to, for the first time in my life, feel a connection with my high school team that is not only there because there are people from my club team also on the team.  I suppose I can't say that I have been doing anything to change this in years past; as a junior I probably should have stepped up and fostered inter-team bonding, but it's difficult.  I want to feel like a team, a whole team, and judging by the first meet, I think we are on our way to doing that.  I am excited about our agenda (the swimming seniors had a double lunch meeting last Tuesday to plan for the season!) and our leadership, and I am excited to use the fact that I know everybody to help this along.

I love being a senior!

See you tonight...

i go to seek a Great Perhaps

"It's so hard to leave -- until you leave.  And then it's the easiest goddamn thing in the world."

- John Green, Paper Towns

It's weird to think about leaving.  While a year ago the only leaving I contemplated was the leaving of a few friends who were going to college, now it is my own of which I so frequently think.  Leaving.  Like, going off on my own.  It sounds funny to say; it feels weird to type.  Doesn't taste right in my mouth.  And yet the word is so full of promise, so full of excitement, that I can't help but welcome it even as I cower in fear.

Aside from the fact that I have no idea what I am going to be doing with my life one year from now, or where I will be, leaving is scary because for the first time in my life, I will be truly independent.  I will make my own decisions.  No more stupid 11pm curfews when I get in trouble, no more being grounded.  No more lectures and no more nagging about my grades.  Yes, these things keep me on my toes, and yes, I am scared of having to keep track of all of the things in my life on my own, but at the same time, I will be responsible for making good decisions and trusting myself.  It's weird that I won't have a pair of parents constantly threatening to relinquish their trust in me.

"Here's to all the places we went. And all the places we'll go."

- An Abundance of Katherines

I don't know where I am going, but I am excited.  I am excited for what I will do and who I will become.  Though I tremble in fear at the thought of the future, I also welcome it with open arms and an open mind.

"Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were 'I go to seek a Great Perhaps.' That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps." 

- Looking for Alaska

in other news: i got a 91 percent on my bc calc test today, which makes me want to cry of happiness.  and i clearly love john green, but what else is new....

mais surtout, vive la différence

PLEASE NOTE: I am going to Nashville this weekend for a swim meet, so I probably won't have access to the internet to post blog stuff.  I am going to try to write out blog entries each day, but we will see if that actually happens (swimming is a busy life.)  If I don't get to write anything, know that I am thinking of you!

I just got back from a Wednesday night discussion, for the first time at the Hills' house (I suppose if you aren't a part of my youth group, I suppose this won't mean that much to you), and I must say that I am profoundly impressed.  The atmosphere was just so, so, good for fostering discussion and I felt like a lot of people who are not normally very engaged were making great, thought-provoking contributions.  It is very refreshing to hear these new perspectives, and this is probably the first Wednesday night that I have really been pushed to think about what the discussion means to me and what my opinions are when pitted next to the opinions of others.

But I was really moved by the fact that a few freshmen that don't normally talk spoke up and made a contribution.  As a freshman in youth group, I attended these Wednesday nights every single week, and I would always sit in awe, listening to the upperclassmen discuss profound matters, thoughts spinning through my head at a million miles per hour.  I would leave these discussions deep in thought, and it was these discussions that really made my freshman year infinitely more fulfilling and a much greater learning experience than it ever could have been otherwise.  The comments that the upperclassmen would make would put into words either ideas that I had never been able to dictate, or ideas that had never before crossed my mind.  Either way, the effect was profound.

Gradually I gained the ability to form my own opinions on what was discussed, but these thoughts stayed sealed up inside my head.  I have no shame in admitting that I got C's on every one of my speeches in my oral comm class, simply because I am so much more of a writer than I am a speaker.  I am the kind of person that, while eloquent in text, inadvertently adds ums and uhs to her sentences when speaking candidly; the kind of person that stumbles over the words that sound so perfect in her head.  I don't think I ever spoke up once during a Wednesday night discussion my freshman year, in part because I was intimidated by the profound older kids, but also because of my discomfort with my own opinions and with going about their verbalization.

I figured that by my junior year, I would be confident enough to share my thoughts with the group.  And while that was not entirely true, because my Wednesday night attendance wavered during that year because of the amount of schoolwork I had, I suppose I spent my sophomore and junior year preparing for what would come my senior year.  And, yes, more senior year sappiness, but I feel that we are doing a very good job within the youth group with encouraging underclass participation, not because we try to force it, but because we try to act more open and welcoming than the seniors my freshman year ever did.

That is why having freshman participation to me was so touching.  I feel like I am really doing something right with the group of seniors that are in my youth group.  I feel like we are making people more confident with their own opinions and with vocalizing them.  I feel like we are inspiring them, like we are helping them realize who they are.

And maybe I am the only one who really was this affected by these Wednesday night discussions.  Maybe I am the only one who was really that scared to make their opinions vulnerable by putting them out in the open where they could be picked apart in discussion.  But even if I am, at least I know that I have overcome this, and that I have even the slightest chance of helping someone do the same.