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Selling Myself in this Job Market

I’ve always felt weird talking about my work. Don’t get me wrong, I love sharing my research and the importance of history with people but discussing it as my expertise feels a bit like an imposter. Besides, so many people are already writing and narrating their accomplishments to the void of the internet. We all shout and hope we are heard over the cacophony of curated noise. That’s what this is, isn’t it? Recent graduates, professionals, all trying to break into our respective fields by posting on LinkedIn glossy images of our projects with self-inflationary captions to sell ourselves to recruiters and the larger professional world. And it feels like we must do that.

I had a phone call with a CRM professional. I had asked them for advice early in the summer, and they had been kind enough to reply and offer to keep in touch with advice. On that phone call, I learned that it was standard practice for this professional to do a LinkedIn search for every recent graduate that reaches out to them. If one person is doing it and referring to the practice in such a blase way, then surely others are also doing it. An unspoken requirement is then to be found online.

On the other hand, I had an advisor admonish social media. To him, what crafts a reputation and an institution’s longevity is doing the work. He believed completed projects and word of mouth spoke volumes about the ethics and capacity of a public historian. That requires a lot of faith in a system. Faith, I generationally do not have. I grew up with the internet, with Facebook and Instagram. Naturally, my brain immediately ingests that advice and asks “if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” How will outsiders know about completed projects without a record of it? There’s even a line in Newsies: “If it’s not in the papes, it never happened.” Central here is promotional and documentary necessity of sharing events and accomplishments.

It is a fine line. I have to be active on these professional network sites to be findable, but then I must determine how much of myself I post online. How much of my work life receives a carousel style post on an Instagram account dedicated to bringing public history to the people via social media’s algorithm? Because truthfully, doing community centered work must always ask the ethical question related to the use of photographs from projects. Who gains from these projects? Who gains from the LinkedIn post “expressing your gratitude for the opportunity to work with this community”?

Tangentially, before every LinkedIn post, before every authoritatively answered question I receive at my job, I ask: where do I allow myself to speak with expertise, particularly in a field like history and heritage where most practitioners are wildly educated? What is enough experience? This is a problem of someone who delves into subjects and likely does not have the Dunning-Kruger effect. Despite holding the degree in my hand, despite the experiences I’ve gained, I still feel like I am not an authority on a subject. But, that is imposter syndrome at its finest, isn’t it? Imposter syndrome is that shadow that lurks in every blog post, every job application. It’s a wrinkle in a rug at the top of a flight of stairs.

How do I get over it? I don’t think I’ll ever be the person that posts about every single project that I complete. I don’t think I will be the person that has a TikTok account instructing people who to clean a tombstone or how to care for a family scrapbook. I might link cited resources, craft resource lists like the good little librarian I am. Hell, I’m thinking of consulting with the community members I’ve worked with on any reflective blog posts about the projects. Something in my gut says that is the best way to ensure joint agency and joint ownership over how the project is portrayed and used to benefit me and the community it was for.

How else do employers and people themselves discover practitioners that can bring unique perspectives to the field? How else do governing officials and other community members hear about the work going on in their locales? But, it isn’t just about me and the shiny “look at what I’m doing” promotional work all professionals must now do. There is the perceived confidence in posting about projects completed, thanking communties for the work done and opportunities had. If I’m having to sell myself as a brand of public historian, I want to be aware of the image I’m projecting to those that I work with.

21st Century Titanic

The world started to end when we hit the ice berg
Such a little thing
Barely a rock of the boat, really
No one noticed the crack in the hull
The water filling the rooms below.

Or, maybe we did
Just called for the band to play 
To continue dancing
Even as the hair on the back of our necks raised
Everything will be fine.

"Everything will be fine"
We say this as there's another rock of the boat
Another groan from below.
We say we're going to be okay like a mantra
While divvying up life vests
And counting the people the would fit in the boats

Women and children first!
Take the most vulnerable
They're always the first to go.
The first to hear the groaning of metal creaking and the cracking
To feel the water dampening their shoes and climbing up their pant legs
While the rest of us continue to dance.

It's too late for that
As I'm treading water
Searching for a scrap of wood
A life boat
Anything to help keep my head above water
I heard the ship groan in the night
As pieces collapse in the icy water.
I did everything right
I ignored the piles of student debt
The recession indicators
The headlines of mass layoffs used to wrap the fish and chips I ate on deck
I feel so stupid now
Fingers numb from the cold water
I keep treading
Working three jobs
While going back to school
Applying to jobs that disappear the next week
Count my pennies 
Save my coupons
For the week's trip to the grocery store
I keep treading water
Watching the rents
Begging my legs not to give out
Searching for a light swinging from a life boat
Believing that even though I ignored the creaks
And the groans
Oblivious to the iceberg that cracked the greatest ship
Danced while the band played until they too clambered into the life boats
I hope to survive this
To be unsinkable
Like Molly Brown.

Thoughts on Success

What does success mean for people in their twenties? Am I successful just because I finished my undergraduate degree? Do I not reach success until I complete a graduate program? I’ve been out of school for a year and a half, in the traditional workforce for just over a year, and I can’t seem to decide if I’ve reached an amount of success for my generation.

            I’ve always been told success meant one of two things—monetary reward or personal fulfillment. It even comes out in my defacto response when people raise their eyebrows when I talk about my history degree. I say, “I decided to be happy and poor.” In that one sentence is an unconscious acceptance that one cannot receive monetary success as well as personal fulfillment. But does a job provide personal fulfillment?

            The work-world has undergone quite a bit of criticism in the last four years. COVID changed how people brought themselves to work, revolutionized the acceptance of bringing your whole self to work, and opened discussions about mental health and work. Then Gen Z began to enter the workforce. I love my generation. We question everything, including workplace norms. “Lazy Girl Jobs” swept the internet. Boundaries were prioritized. Jobs are meant to be one of the many pieces on the journey of finding yourself that includes travel and friendships and self-care. Many people in my generation online seem quite content to not use their job to find personal success—they actively discourage it even.

            I don’t know if I am that kind of person. I am not a ‘Lazy Girl Job’ girlie. I get too invested. I care about every aspect of my work—whether its paid or unpaid (I do have quite the knack for working for free). I do not do the bare minimum, and I am concerned with all aspects of a project. It’s gotten me into a tiff at work because I care about my work so much. Logically, I know that I should not find all my happiness in my work. Thank God, I don’t…I think.

            Happiness and success are two different things. Usually. There are several Lifetime and Hallmark movie plots about the successful but unhappy businesswoman or lawyer or tech startup employee (they really updated with the times) who impulsively gives it up to find happiness usually in the form of a stereotypical hunk of a man from some sort of blue-collar background. The woman cannot be happy and successful. She must choose.

            Of course, the moral of the woman’s storyline is that she was chasing monetary and career-oriented success before she realized those things don’t matter, but family and love do. Ugh. There are so many things problematic about that life lesson.

            So, where do I find success? Is it measured in the connections I make, and the people I serve as a librarian? It made my month to know that I was helping put some pep in Miss Thelma’s step by helping her with her book and her upcoming photo exhibit. Helping Phil create his platform for his book also brought a smile to my face, seeing his website and Facebook page gain following is one of the highlights of my month. That is the definition of personal satisfaction success. And look at that, it is tied directly to my work.

            While I love this definition of success, there is a nagging at the back of my head related to how I can have that definition of success. I am very fortunate to be able to continue to mooch off my parents while I am starting my career. My parents let me live with them rent free. My car is paid off. I have parent-subsidized groceries (i.e. my mom or dad pick up approximately half my grocery bill). This is not because I ask them to, by the way. I feel like I need to make that very clear how much it annoys me that I cannot live on my own. I am making a therapist very rich as I work through that annoyance. The upside to that situation is that I do not worry about money. Money is not the backbone of my being. It doesn’t have to be because of the privileged position I am in. My measure of success therefore does not have to be tied to ‘making it’ in society. So, then is my personal satisfaction definition of success, a valid goal? In an extrapolated context, is personal satisfaction success a valid self-help guru advocated goal for most people, or is it inherently blind to the reasons others cannot measure their success in such a way?

            In terms of happiness, it is a valid goal. My happiness should not be tied to what I make, and that is a very privileged thing to say. Fulfillment does not necessarily have to come from a job, but what it might allow you to do overall. Because I tied up my definitions of happiness and success, I create a quagmire of privilege and awareness of said privilege and feasibility. My success could come from the recognition I feel for myself or receive from others related to my work, and my work could bring me happiness. I enjoy helping people achieve their goals and working on socially impactful historical projects.

            I don’t think success can be tangible in your twenties. Just figuring out how you define these things can count as a step toward success for the future. I might just be representative of Gen Z in that way.

the shaken soda can

There’s this existential dread
That is seeping in
This---

Pressure building
Like a shaken soda can
Whispering the fizzles 
Of the explosion about to burst
Before the whistling
Of hydrogen gas escaping.

I never seem to be short of advice
Of how to grow up right.
Each rule for perfection 
Wrapped up tight in contradiction.

To be caring but not a doormat.
To read the news but not let it bring you down
To love yourself but always be working on you
To be skinny but not care about the weight
To get a degree but not go into debt.

Check one off the list only to put it right back.
Can’t have one without the other.
Sweeping out the dust and removing the clutter
With the help of therapists and antidepressants

Only to stack new worries on the shelf
Through one more ball into the air of this juggling act. 
One ball for caring about appearance, another for lack of vanity.
One for being helpful and another for setting boundaries. 

Hold two in each hand, and still find seven up in the air. 
It’s like attempting to cap that shaken soda can.
Catch the balls that fall--
Try to distinguish if they’re glass or plastic. 

Mix metaphors
The same way most of these rules hold each other taut
An elastic force creating the tightrope on which I walk

I can’t be jaded
Too loud 
Or too weird.

I have to walk 10,000 steps, 
And work 40 hours each week,
And never miss my Duolingo Streak. 
These are the best days of my life
When I should be putting myself out there
But every self-help book claims I need to focus on my career.

Do I even want a career?
Because this juggling act seems like enough as is
A career would be like throwing the balls in the air
Hopping on a unicycle
Like a Barnum and Bailey’s second act

Look here! 
Watch this Twenty-Something do it all!

Unicycle toward her career while juggling each and every trait twenty-three years in this society could create to be the model person.

But this juggling act feels like mentos in a soda bottle
Shaken and freshly taken out of the freezer.
Ready to explode as the plastic and the glass come raining down
Because this Barnum and Bailey’s act is destined to drown.

Revisiting the Grave

When I was eighteen, I could not help but notice, like all teenagers inevitably do, that the world was pretty terrible. There was this anxiety that anything good to come from activism would be ripped away, chipped away like a sculptor chiseling marble. There are days that I still feel this way. However, somewhere during my college years and even now in early adulthood, I find myself thinking about the type of person who stood on a small stage in a library and sobbed this existential prayer for something, anything to get better. I wrote a response to that mindset, that paradigm that I was engulfed in.

I thought I was digging my grave
Overturning earth and silt
Remembering the world humanity had built
Watched it crumble
And erode
Like a maddeningly widening river
Tearing away at the coast lines
Bit by bit
Until the beaches melt away
Giving way to flood plains
And rocky coasts.

I believed I was digging my grave
Younger me burying adult me
Embalming me in the magic of my childhood
Glitter and fairy dust
Painting my lips red with the blood from my depression
Combing anxiety picked lashes
Singing psalms of woe is my life
All my optimism clutched with the dead lilies artfully placed in my cold hands.

Younger me thought I was dying 
As the world retreated to a Handmaid’s Tale. 
Unaware there is a rebirth
In the shroud draped over my painted face
Underneath the newly turned earth
Deep in the rumble of the tectonic plates
Where the ground water kisses the soil
There is the rumble of feet
The pounding of a drum
An incessant reminder that I am one life
One body added to the timeline of history
One beast yet to be studied

I’ve been digging and digging 
Digging my grave
Trapped in this feedback loop 
Of every negative utterance in existence
Most often from my own damn head--
 But Individuals can’t make history
Controlled like a marionette 
Strings from my place of birth
My socioeconomic status
The color of my skin
My uterus!

The puppeteer tells me to walk
When to dance
For a GPA, a job, a picture-perfect life meant to be enclosed in a children’s puppet show.
But what is this?

I’ve been digging and digging
Digging my grave
Collecting sand for my hourglass
Selecting a headstone
Anticipating The End.
As if I am too small to be made into anything
Too weak under this rock we’ve called home
I am not the new Atlas shouldering the world alone
I am no Hercules
Joan of Arc
Or Odysseus.
I am not some mythologized figure
Like those taught in history class
Giants wandering the earth biding their time
Until the world told them
They were to make history.

I’ve been digging and digging
Digging my grave
Clutching my spade
Drowning in the darkness brought on by the shade
Of the trees 
On whose roots I sit—
And it is here
That I remind myself how to live.

an ode to being young

I remember feeling the world spinning
when I was standing still
Every decision felt like moving marble stone
to create foundations for buildings I had yet to design

I just wished someone had told me 
those marble stones were made of plaster
still heavy but with the capability to be chiseled and moved.

Look at me. 
Speaking as if I've got a clue
like this Lincoln Log cabin
means I've got it all figured out

when I am really a pebble
being tossed about in the current
attempting stability only to be topped over by gentle rapids and vomiting stream.
I've only just become content
with my place as a pebble
choosing how the rive will wear on me.
It can 
Fracture me, scar my edges, chip them into urchin spines
or beat me soft.
Mold me into the kind of pebble kids learn to skip stones with
the kind that is painted vibrantly and left in our National Parks
instead of the kind that embed themselves in bare skin
and rip the bottoms of your feet to shreds.

I don't have it all figured out
but I have a clue
about the kind of rock tossed about the river that I want to be.

what I’ve learned so far

            Six months ago, I finished an AmeriCorps program with Northern Bedrock Historic Preservation Corps. At the end of this job, I moved back home, back into my bedroom from high school complete with shared bathroom. Since I moved home, I have created a professional life for myself in the form of work at the library as well as volunteer opportunities at an archive and a historic preservation organization. In the six months since I have moved home I have learned several things.

  • I am a sheep.

Everyone grows up being told they are a leader…I am in fact not. I will not be a disruptor, asking for forgiveness instead of permission. There is no problem with this mentality. I am the support. This role suits me well. This realization hit me when I anxiously replaced the sign advertising the library’s social media handles. The old sign was peeling off the desk, so any rational person would say it was time to give that sign a face lift. However, nothing gave me quite the adrenaline rush like replacing the old sign with one of my own design without first asking my manager. Did I do it right? Will someone be upset that I changed this?

      I know in all honesty that no one will notice the sign change. I repeat organizational processes and wait for someone else to begin executing an idea before I get involved. Then, of course, I replicate the work and carry it out like the little sheep I am. Sheep honestly get a bad rep in our society, but not everyone is a leader…not everyone can be one. Someone must be there to add magnitude to the change.

  • Preservation and Reconciliation go hand in hand.

My college degree focused on general history and political science. My political science degree was mentored by a woman who studied atrocities and security issues. This means I know the basics of political systems, but I know a lot about studying mass atrocities/historical atrocities and how governments and people rebuild after them. Preservation, or public history might be the broader term to utilize, can facilitate reconciliation within an area.

            Like most Southern states, my state was involved in the Civil War. People were formerly enslaved here, and a lot of the families still live here (it is almost crazy to see the number of descendants of enslaved people living just mere miles from the descendants of people who owned them). Public history can play a substantial role in beginning to rebuild relationships after the atrocious system that was slavery and the academic focus on white institutions that followed it. Every time a document is discovered, an archive can choose to process it and make it available for research use. There are political implications to a backlog—what is chosen for digitization, when it is chosen, and how accessible that digitization is. Making Civil War Confederacy records readily available but not US Colored Troop records has a political implication (most of the instances are not as obvious as this hypothetical). Preservation organizations can choose which sites to focus their advocacy work toward from saving historically Black cemeteries or antebellum plantations (again the reality is much more nuanced).

            To illustrate this nuance, the organization that I volunteer with recently made the decision to move a Rosenwald school from its original location to a new campus to be turned into a museum. The choice to move the school (and hence not allow the school to be eligible for Historic Register status) comes with equity in mind. The land the school sits on, which is owned by Black families from the area, is now worth nearly one million dollars. The decision to move the school protects the memory of the institution, but also allows these families to have their payday (in an area where their neighborhoods used to be considered a ‘ghetto’ area, and their ancestors have been robbed of wealth building opportunities).

  • Where I live has not realized the world has changed.

When I moved back home, I desperately wanted to begin working in the local historical community. Within several weeks, I came to the realization that there were no jobs in that area. There were no jobs, and most people that did anything related to history were volunteers.

            Tennessee is not called the Volunteer State for nothing, I guess. The county historian—volunteer. People who help prepare exhibits on local history for the organization I volunteer for—volunteers. Those that digitize documents for the archive—volunteer. It is expected from these organizations that people who can volunteer regularly for eight hours a week still exist. The housewife hardly exists anymore! How can an entity expect someone to work for free in today’s economy? For an area that prides itself on preserving its history and working diligently to display it, it is quite shocking to realize how much the city relies on essentially free labor.

            My hometown is coming upon a crossroads in this regard. It will have to choose whether to appropriately compensate the people necessary to care for these historic resources—the documents, the books, the buildings, the cemeteries—or risk the future prosperity of that goal. People cannot work for free anymore. Volunteers cannot regularly come in unless they are retired (and even retirement seems like a wish in this economy). There is special knowledge needed to protect these things, and the city must contend with its decision to not keep up with the reality.

  • I need to marry rich.

Now, before assumptions are made, I am being somewhat facetious. Based on my activities—working for the library and copious amounts of volunteer work, I am best suited for the lifestyle of being a trophy wife. The rich spouse would cover the living expenses—rent, food, electricity, water, internet. My job would be to spend the rest on philanthropic endeavors like the Vanderbilt wives did in the 1890s. The money made working at a library is sufficient for my own spending, possibly sufficient to use as donations to these organizations; however, I am no longer pressed monetarily and can enjoy these pursuits of making society better.

            There could be another essay or research project in here about the necessity of a house spouse. Economists have calculated the financial and economic impact of being a stay at home parent—providing a numerical value to the labor these individuals do around the home. That would be combined with the group of people who can be involved in society in a service aspect without the avarice or the anxiety associated with the pay of this kind of work. People desire communities, and the house spouses can develop those community ties. Without working, they could plan potlucks, be involved in the PTO, or pay attention to the civic and governmental organizations. This level of financial security could increase well-being. Would it be so difficult to raise the bar for a healthy economy to one that includes the ability for one partner to not work full time?

            Six months is not a long time to let all these experiences marinate in my skull. These lessons will change or simmer down into a more cohesive conclusion as time rolls on. This is also just a sliver of what I have learned (some of the more organizational lessons won’t be written down until after I have left this state since I still want to work here). I am still young, with professional lessons left to learn.

let’s be friends

Let’s be friends
Friends like the we text every day
Friends like those that finish each other’s—
--sentences…
That lean into one another’s space the same way
Flowers grow at the base of trees
Roots intertwining 
Mingling 
Growing from the same environment
Like when you met me.

Twelve years old
New and alone
A friend of a friend
God, I thought you were so cool,
So nerdy and confused.

And we circled and circled
Being the friends of friends
Not interacting but knowing of each other’s existence
This persistence 
That we were supposed to be in the other’s life

Maybe that’s why I got that Instagram message that night.
One that started as we stared at our respective ceilings
Thinking life was over
Just because we could not picture the Next. 

Next meant change, 
Meant moving to new places, new roommates, or being strangled into staying in a state you despised
Rooming with the discomfort of wanting to move on but not being able to.
I started Hot Girl Walking before Hot Girl Walking was Hot Girl Walking
Making my loops around the block
Like the anxiety bicycling around my head
Peddling as fast as my legs could walk
(I don’t bike. It’s not that I can’t; it’s that I don’t).
Maybe my anxiety was trying to run away as my feet carried me 
When walks turned into long drives
Where this spiraling anger bubbled up
Scrambling my head like the metaphors in this poem

And then we met. 
We became friends over tacos and conversation.
We became friends as we never stopped talking
Checking in
Laughing 
And we kept going.
Let’s be friends
The kind of friends that get mistaken for dating
The you’re my everything type of friend
Where when I see you I can’t help but be smiling

Let’s be friends
Even when we move apart. Two states, new jobs,
These are bricks to build bridges or walls, and we’ve built an engineering masterpiece. 
With arches and support beams
Holding us above the water we used to gaze about into. 

Let’s be friends
When we go from friends who see each other to friends that text
From friends who text to the happy birthday, merry Christmas friends
To the friends we see in Instagram posts and smile
Wish them well
Call them friends when you don’t really know them.

Let’s be…friends.

thoughts on the year

When 2022 first started, I wondered if I would be like those girls from Christian colleges—the ring before spring crowd. Sure, Brad and I had our problems. It felt like things were strained even as we pretended everything was normal. I pushed for more philosophical conversations like when we first started dating. Asked about the state of the world, how we the oh mighty youth might solve the problems if only the old curmudgeons got out of the way.

            Okay, I did not phrase it quite like that. But, 2022 entered stage right with my relationship in the forefront. It was the star of the show—every one of my friends was a mutual friend of mine and Brad’s. Even casual conversation with my English professor always came back to sincerely asking how things are with Brad. We were a package deal. We carpooled to campus, ate lunch together, were golden.

            The ground had not even begun to thaw before cracks were forming in the foundation of most of my life in Virginia. Here is the thing no one tells you when you’re in the midst of being consumed by one person—your entire life is connected to that person like you signed a waiver for a trial period of being a conjoined twin. When the cracks form, when the trial period ends, and you’re being cut from that other person, you think you’re dying.

            I made it one week living in Washington, DC for a semester before problems floated to the surface. I texted every couple of hours with updates from my day. His replies were forced. You know the drill. It’s the slow suffocation of a relationship. Robotic replies sour into the request for space. And, naturally, in a place where I did not have any close friends. I just met most of these people or only talked in passing with them, and now I was living with them. I was not even close to comfortable telling one person that suddenly my two year relationship was hanging on by a thread.

            I eventually told one person. We hiked as a group in Rock Creek Park, one of the housemates hanging behind with me. She was kind enough to ask about Brad, and I was too wound up from the two days of no contact to come up with a lie. By February, the thread snapped, and suddenly a weekend trip to see my boyfriend at home became a rush to bring my car to DC, arrange for my cat to get back to Tennessee, and a quiet agreement to remain friends at least until graduation.

            Maybe I was a late-bloomer, but this was the first break up I had ever experienced. I had not known the hours of staring at a wall, of struggling to look at my phone, my laptop, anywhere really because all of my personal belongings were etched with memories of him and what we had, all past tense things which make living in the present feel wrong. So people got me new things.

            My sister was the first to start the trend. She sent me a mug from Amazon. It was a marble pink with the words “I will shank a bitch for you, right in the kidney” embossed on one side. Another housemate gave me a box of tissues with funny sayings. A different one had me throw the sweaters to the back of my wardrobe. I got dragged out of the house to just be somewhere else, as if new experiences could halt my mind from dwelling on the old. I got emotional intimacy from a group of people that were not connected to my relationship. That whole semester felt like I was stitching scar tissue where I had been severed from my conjoined twin, yet I was also standing on my own two feet.

            Nothing is original. Every thought, story, phrase, or action comes from somewhere. We might get our accent from our parents and our teachers. We learn behaviors from watching others, learn words from copying someone else’s words. Ideas are synthesized and marinated amongst every book we have read, every person we have interacted with, every TikTok we have watched. For a majority of my quotidian tasks, I was reminded of Brad. I thought was the little things: the music he listened to, how he took his coffee, what comedians he watched late at night to sleep.

            By the time I left DC, I did not find Brad in the every day. I made French toast for my sister in December. As I dipped the bread in the egg batter, I thought of the last day of classes when I made breakfast for the house. Noah came downstairs and made it his job to dip the bread. He even slapped my hand away when I tried to do his job.

            When I lay on a couch, I remember the feeling of Sarah, Noah, and E curled up around me. I think of how E liked having his head scratched, and how Sarah gripped my arm tight. Sitting, doing solitary activities with other people—my friends all on their phones after a day of work in one of our cars—takes me back to evenings on a futon in the basement, sitting shoulder to shoulder with Jeremiah while we both worked on our projects. I cannot hear “When it Rains it Pours” without thinking of hearing that song being blasted throughout the house while Justine was in the shower. There are very few things in my life now that I cannot be reminded of someone else. If I did not experience it in DC, I got it while working in Minnesota.

            I worked in Minnesota on crews of five. We mostly worked for the Forest Service preserving historical sites. I still think about the conversations I had—from discussions of racial justice in the music industry and in the Elvis movie, to bonding over a love for racoons with another. Sitting in a lead-painted bunk house up in Ely, Minnesota, it was one of the times I felt closest to a group of people.

            This year was defined by those people. Not one person, not a relationship that was supposed to be the one person who was my everything. No. That is not how communities work, not how people work. Platonic attachments are the ones that bring the most consistent joy and pride. I did not think about then, but one night I was talking to my housemate Jeremiah. We were discussing dating, and I remember very distinctly that Jeremiah told me he did not date. Because, and I quote, “society undervalues friendships, and I prefer those.”

            To be frank, I gotta hear something at least twice before I realized God wants me to learn something. Angela Chen echoed this notion in her book ACE by describing the role of expectations to have a partner and what a partner meant in a cultural context versus, say, a friendship. Chen also questioned the need to label and put the two—friendship and romance in exclusive boxes. That is what I got out of her book anyway. My happiness has come from solid friendships that uplift and prioritize a mutual community. I was my happiest frolicking in the Minnesota wilderness because I had this community of people that cooked with me, joked around with me. I cannot listen to Taylor Swift without thinking of my birthday gift. My coworkers serenaded me as I drove off to the Minneapolis airport with a rendition of “Twenty-Two.”

            Most of society has prioritized romantic relationships as the number one source of happiness. It’s ingrained in us to see that point of view. Our parents ask us who our girlfriend/boyfriend is when we introduce them to a friend from kindergarten. Grandparents start asking about great grandkids at Thanksgiving. Even with how mainstream fan culture has become, we see how easily every strong friendship can be viewed as something more, something romantic. Even phrasing it as ‘something more’ illustrates how romantic attachments are placed up on this pedestal because it equates to significant other > friendships. With no academic sources to back me up, no statistics, purely anecdotally, it seems that by placing significant others in this greater than category only increases fears of loneliness, increases the brokenness that comes when a romantic relationship ends.

            Now, I have not read this book yet, but I have been recommended to read Tribe by Sebastian Junger. It is supposedly a study of Western culture’s pervasive loneliness because we de-emphasize community and family ties. Friendship is just a smaller circle than a community (as I have been reminded that a community could be just ten families), and I hope to see if I find resonance with Junger.

            Every person has entered my life in 2022, and it was a conscious choice to be close, be vulnerable with these people. That vulnerability—to rely on people as I went through a break up, as I was feeling lost about what to do next, even now when I’m confused as to what career I want to try on like  a new pair of jeans—brought me out of my loneliness. Even now, as I sit back at home with my parents and sister, all my friends off in different states doing cool things, I do not feel alone because I know there is this network out there that I check in on and that checks in on me.

renewing vows

Some of y’all know that I wrote a poem in high school about school shootings. You can read the original HERE. In response to the latest one at Covenant School, here is another one.

Nothing changes
I can watch clouds move across the mountains
But we are trapped in a stasis
Paralyzed by our own nostalgia
Remembering, clinging to our catatonia

I want to say six years have passed
I blew out each year added in a birthday candle
Recognized its passing as I graduated from sparkling juice to sparkling wine

Today, I still feel 17.
Standing on a small stage
Shouting into an abyss of waiting poets and people
Hoping that would make a change.
I was 17 when the walkouts began
When marching for our lives meant advocating for gun reform
Not the right of a bundle of cells yet to be born.

Yet I am still here
Acting as a minister
As we marry two star crossed lovers
With our thoughts and our prayers
Throw rice as they walk down the aisle
To a hearse decorated with tin cans and just married painted on the rear view window

I attended this reception as a flower girl before
Time has only passed where I am merely a guest
Watching as other young ring bearers and flower children traipse toward the alter

Crashing to their knees
Tears staining their cheeks
Because this is supposed to be a happy day in wedding season
Isn't it strange that we know statistically that these weddings happen more in spring?
Where we exchange promises
To protect life
As we cross fingers behind our backs
Gun reform an ideal too far from reality

We cry
Happy tears as we see the bride
Willfully passive behind a veil
So she doesn't have to look these babies in their eyes

Miss America holds Death's hands 
To renew their vows
And I sit in the pews
Wondering if this will be a double feature
Include a funeral too
I wished for a divorce 
I marched for a divorce
Screamed on a stage like a toddler protesting my mother's second marriage

And nothing changes.