This is another story about a memory.
I fell down the rabbit hole the other day. After the dream which I detailed in my last post, on the way home from work I listened to some REM. It was the first time I’d chosen to listen to REM in… years. They used to be my favorite band. I have a Spotify playlist of REM night driving songs. When it landed on “Man on the Moon,” I literally fell back to a moment in history.
There was a night in 1993 when I was sitting on my windowsill, looking out at the yard of the house we were about to be evicted from, making what at that point was a critically important decision, listening to Automatic 4 the People. I’d been offered admission to a exclusive boarding school, but at the same time the state had pulled funding for the lesser-off who were admitted, so it looked like several people, including me, wouldn’t get to attend. I started a fight, going to the governor and to the first lady. Thanks to my efforts– I was in the newspaper for it and everything– the state saved the program.
But that night, watching it rain, thinking about how I’d soon have to pack all of my stuff and go back to my grandma’s basement, I chose NOT to go to that fancy school and instead to stay at my little all-white high school and to live with my mom and step-dad in an unfinished basement. After all the noise I’d made for the right to go, after I’d taken all the congratulations, after I’d made all the plans… I chose not to go. Exactly no one understood. Most people were mad at me.
I’m not sure I ever told anyone the real reasons why. They were, in no particular order:
- I wasn’t the boarding school type. I don’t deal well with roommates. I didn’t think I was ready to share my life with some random stranger. I was becoming me.
- When I visited, my host, stone-faced and pale, took me for a long walk the day I left and told me, point blank, “Man, don’t come here. I mean it might help you get into college, but don’t come here. It’s so, so bad. You don’t even know.” I have always thought I could read people, and I was reading that this kid was terrified and trying to save me. It really shook me.
- I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my mom with an abusive spouse stuck in my grandma’s basement. Ironically, it would be me, and not him, who found us a place to live so we could leave that basement a few months later.
The backlash of me not going to that school were significant. I was an outcast before, but I became sort of a supreme outcast. To a very select few, I became sort of a weird quasi-martyr who had fought someone else’s battle then decided I wanted to stay “legit” and make my way where I was. I clung to those people, a group that were almost all older than me by a year or two. I became the “intellectual” that I’d be for the rest of my life in that time, reading books of philosophy and political theory, listening to subversive music, learning some critical race theory. I turned into a sort of trouble-maker. I built expert skills in the things I was good at, which in high school was almost everything a high school student has to do. It was… surreal but interesting. I fell in love with ideas.
The decision that night changed three things about me forever, though. It was, relatively speaking, one of the most major moments in shaping my personality.
The first thing I realized is that getting advice is good (and I would continue to get, and even take, bad advice from people who I knew had the right things at heart), but that ultimately you have to answer to yourself for the things you do. Making the decision about that school was a moment in time where my anxiety came into full bloom, I started to realize what being around people did to me, and I would lay my head down at night and wage war with myself until I was so exhausted I fell asleep. Making my choice quieted that fight in my head, even if it created a whole host of uncomfortable moments for me out in the world. It was worth it. That’s a thing I am afraid many adults don’t learn that I learned as a teen. It sucks when people are cruel to you, second guess you, etc. But that’s nothing if you can close your eyes when the day is over and feel like you did the right thing. The voice in your head will fuck you up worse than anyone else EVER can.
The second thing I learned similar to that but deserves its own moment. I– and even after that, to a lesser degree, though that was the first time I broke the tradition– tried to make people proud of me. I think it’s because if you take real-world value and try to attach it to who I was as a teenager, I didn’t have much. I needed to prove my worth. So when I could get some accolade, I reached out and grabbed it so people could see that someone LIKE ME got something that I wasn’t supposed to. I didn’t always think about what I wanted. I reverted into this briefly when I applied to Law schools, and I still owe the man I remember as Morpheus from Berkeley for saving me by reminding me that what I wanted and needed was what mattered and not that I impressed people by going to an elite law school. Still– I have my own vanity. I had to have that trophy. I had to know I COULD go to a top ranked law school, that the poor kid could come up. I lost a valuable friendship to proving that to myself, but losing the friendship is on him. He didn’t listen to me when I told him what I was feeling and he couldn’t deal with my choices. I didn’t do anything to hurt him, but he took it all so personally.
The last thing I learned from making that decision is a paradox that I swear to you will save your life if you let it. The first half, ironically, was echoed by Littlefinger on GoT this week. When you get ready to operate in the world, you need to imagine every possible outcome. I even practice conversations I think might happen in my head. You have to have considered how everything might go best, worst, and in between. This is how you survive– you minimize what shocks you.
Now– the paradox. You can’t let the past and the future ruin the now. You have to live the life that is in front of you. So many people I know, and I think it’s particularly bad in the profession I chose, live for a future they expect, or a future they dream of. Or, on the reverse, they worry about the crash to come, the dangers ahead. You can’t run forward blind, but you have to cherish now. If you’re riding in the car on a sunny day and you have a cool diet soda and the sun is shining and the tank has gas, and there’s food to fill your belly, people you love to spend your time with, you should enjoy that, live it, savor it. Don’t worry about the fact that you already know by the end of the month you’ll be dodging creditors until you get your next check. Don’t worry about the fact that you have to return to work in a few days. Don’t worry about checking your phone to see what stupid thing Donald Trump said. If bad is coming for you, bad is coming for you. But don’t invite it. Make it work for the right to descend on you. And if you can glance past it to enjoy the things that truly matter, you have to understand– and I think this is the secret to everything– you can be content and happy even while bad shit is happening in your life. If you wait for stuff to be perfect, you’ll die wishing for one last thing to click into place. You have to find your happiness and your peace in the torrid sea of life.
I could easily lament that I didn’t go away to that school, and because of it, I didn’t get into an Ivy League school like most of the people who did. I could lament what that did to my life.
But honestly– what did it do? What do Ivy League kids do? They go on to law school, and I could have done that at Berkeley. They go into PhD programs, which I did with my regional campus degree. If I had gone to Yale, like one of my colleagues, or Oxford like another, I would have ended up as an assistant professor trying to get tenure at a good college.
I’m an assistant professor at the college I’d have chosen if someone had told me to pick any school in America.
Even with all the stuff that I went through getting there.
So did it hurt me to not get that “opportunity?”
A friend of mine DID go to that school. And his roommate formed a suicide pact with him. He couldn’t pull the trigger himself, but the RA found him sitting on the floor holding a gun by the barrel, staring at his roommate, fragments of brain and blood all over his face. That friend of mine– the smartest guy I think I ever knew– became a druggie. I don’t think he graduated from high school. And I think he might be dead now. We lost touch.
So… what’d he get? What did I miss?
But the other reason I don’t really look back is that I made my choice.
When I decided to leave Berkeley, I had all my stuff in a van. I pointed the van East and I left. My mom kept trying to get me to stop, to think, to explain why I was doing what I was doing. But I wouldn’t. I didn’t stop until I was in Reno. Then I bought a journal and wrote until I passed out in the hotel room. The next day I drove to Oklahoma. The next day, I was back in Richmond, back in my apartment. I had a job teaching later the afternoon. I was back on campus within a week. I had MA applications done in two weeks.
The life in front of you is what matters.
I could have stopped and cried for what I lost. All the effort I made, all the dreams that were behind my desire to be a social justice lawyer and fight oppression.
But why? I chose what I wanted to do.
Sometimes you just have to commit.
200 days ago, I committed to writing here every single night. Sometimes I sit here writing with the voice in my mind that says “the last time you were this honest on the internet you got totally ripped into by your mentor and ruined that relationship forever.” But I still do it. You want me to tell you why, why I do what I’m doing even as a voice echoes in my head telling me I’m not being professional?
Because I made my choice.
I tell people that transparency matters but that transparency is a lie. No one is completely transparent.
But I want to be real. As real as I can be. I’m a man who got chased away from his name and had to come back in through the back door. I’m a person who was born blue, presumed dead. I’m a person who dodged death several times.
I’m going to be me. And while it’d make me really uncomfortable to think that anyone employing me would read all 200 entries here (and the others that are to come), I can say honestly that anyone who would really, truly be bothered by what I’ve written here shouldn’t be my boss or my colleague or my friend. I am who and what I am. I’m done pretending for anyone else. I have been for a while.
If you choose to be you, you will know freedom, no matter how much it scares you. The weight of life will land on your shoulders, but you’ll own it. All the joys, all the pains. It won’t be easy, but it will be what you deserve.
And when you close your eyes, freedom. The freedom of owning your life.
Swan, swan, hummingbird
Hurrah, we’re all free now.