This is a Post about Being a Young Woman in 2019

Note: Yeah, I forgot to blog last week. My partner and I spent the better part of five days driving all over the state to spend time with our families, and with gloriously limited access to the internet, I dropped the ball.

It’s no secret that egging women on to try to “have it all” is, like, everyone’s favorite activity. Second wave women’s lib icons have all done the whole “why can’t we have it all?” bit time and again, but they rarely reveal their secrets.

Here’s why, at least as far as I can tell: there is no secret. You just do it. Usually because we have no other choice.

My mom would say, “Well, Lex, it isn’t that simple.”

And she’d be right, I guess, because she’s had experiences I haven’t and is much wiser than I am. But the advantage I have over her is the kind of stupid, blind ambition and faith that universities throw in with a liberal arts degree.

To be fair, I haven’t always felt this way, and it’s not as if I feel stupid and brave all the time. Starting around junior year of high school I fell deeply in love with The Bell Jar, particularly the fig tree metaphor. And I still love it, so much so that when I turned eighteen, I got a fig tree tattooed on my ankle, the closest I could get to my Achilles tendon (spoiler: this is all a big metaphor for weakness!). Here’s the passage for those of you who aren’t familiar:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

That single paragraph struck me immediately the first time I read it, and more and more each time after that. I wanted to have a family and I wanted to hook up with a bunch of hot foreign guys and I wanted to get famous writing angsty YA fiction and I wanted to be the editor of a cool magazine.

It was a feeling I had grappled with and tried to articulate for years; I thought it was a rarity and that everyone else had one concrete idea of what their life would look like when they grew up. How had Sylvia Plath gotten it so right? (It was probably the depression.)

I think it’s because this is the struggle of every woman: to want everything within one lifetime and being forced to make a decision one way or another, forever wondering “what if?”

Unfortunately for Plath, the journey of having it all—or even choosing to settle on a few of the figs—felt impossible. And while I thought the same for more time than I care to admit, I think now, more than any other time in history, it’s doable, or at least feels like there’s less to lose.

Something I think about a lot is my future in the context of sociopolitical upheaval and climate change. I worry that, though I want to have a family and a career I love, maybe I’ll only get to have a career because it’s unconscionable to have children and give them this planet to inherit.

I’ve always wanted to have children. In high school when I was especially depressed, I went through a phase where I thought, If I don’t even want to live on this planet, why should I make my kids do it? Bleak, I know. But it was—and in many ways still is—a real concern for me.

In addition to a genetic goldmine of mental health issues, children I have can expect to fear gun violence in their schools, food scarcity, unchecked pollution and destruction of biodiversity, unstable job markets, and astronomical higher education expenses.

Do I have my kids in a hospital like my mom did, or do I go to a birthing center, with a midwife and limited drugs? Do I circumcise my sons? Do I let my kids discover their identities all on their own or conform, at least loosely and initially, to the gender binary to avoid confusion and conflict? Do I let them use my iPhone to watch Baby Shark on repeat or let them only play with primitive wooden toys?

There are multitudinous parenting philosophies, but do any of them even touch the concerns we have at this exact cultural moment? I think I asked a lot of these questions in a linguistics course in college and my professor told me I should chill out. But I can’t!

If my partner and I decide to go for it and start a family, I want to do it right, but I constantly worry that maybe what we think is right could be damaging for our kids. I know that we are both loving and kind and open and so I hope we would make great parents, but doesn’t everyone? Haven’t we all seen our fair share of shitty parents? Don’t most of them think they’re doing just fine?

Does any of it matter if the planet is collapsing at the hands of capitalists anyway? In the infinitely wise words of 90’s punk band Sum 41, “I don’t wanna waste my time becoming another casualty of society / I’m never gonna fall in line, become another victim of uniformity.” And I don’t want my kids to, either.

I saw a tweet about this distinct anxiety the other day that hit the nail on the head:

“@Imani_Barbarin: Hey people dumping on millennials, It’s not about avocado toast, or coffee drinks or little trips. It’s about a lack of confidence in the future which makes us believe that saving for it is a waste of time.”

And should we decide to have kids, what if we can’t? I’ve always had this horrible fear that I’m infertile and won’t be able to have kids. That fear notwithstanding, I’ve seen the way reproductive healthcare is going. When Trump was elected, internet circles I follow were recommending people with uteruses look into long-term birth control, such as an IUD, which would prevent unwanted pregnancies for four-plus years and could not be easily taken away.

When I told my doctor on campus—a true-blue hippie who I loved and trusted—I was considering this course of action, she told me she thought we should “wait and see.” At the time, I reasoned that it made sense to think on a decision like that, but when I told my big sister, she said, “What the fuck?” and that made sense to me, too.

But kind of like the good faith to eventually have kids and hope things will turn out alright, I didn’t look into IUDs any further, although I still think about it a lot. Getting birth control has always been a pain in the ass, for me at least, so pursuing a long-term option makes sense. I guess maybe I’m just subconsciously clinging to the notion that things won’t get that bad. But with Trump threatening more than just eight years, what the fuck do I know? Everything feels outrageous and surreal.

I’ve read and watched Handmaid’s Tale, though, and I don’t think Atwood and the producers are very far off track of what’s at stake and what’s possible. This question of what motherhood and parenthood look like in the future is one that, for me, is built on what-ifs rooted in fear. If I were in June’s place, would I just end it? I like to think I’m tough and brave, but I don’t know that I could bear all that. I hope I don’t ever have to think on it harder than that. I hope I don’t have daughters who see it all unfolding like Margaret Atwood predicted thirty years ago.

Last year during the Kavanaugh hearings I felt like I was reliving the aftermath of my assault over and over again every day, and I was miserable especially because I knew nearly every other woman in this country was feeling the same way.

I even shared an essay I’d written in college about my assault in a desperate attempt to explain to my family why I was in so much pain. You can read that here if you haven’t already and would like to.

On one particularly tough day in the fall I expressed the desire to drown my sorrows, so my partner grabbed his keys and said, “Alright, let’s go get a chocolate shake.”

As we drove through downtown in our relatively new home, we noticed a small cluster of folks on a street corner holding signs in protest of Kavanaugh’s appointment, smiling and waving to passing cars. I nearly cried.

I know there are people in the world, and in positions of power, who are doing what they can to undo violence against women and people of color and other minorities. I know there are everyday people actively practicing kindness and generosity to narrow the divide Donald Trump has very purposefully cleaved in this country. I know I am doing my best to do the same. But sometimes it feels like it isn’t nearly enough, that the bad guys win this one, and that we don’t get a happy ending. It’s not a great feeling.

So I guess when I try to define “having it all” things have become a little muddy. The glass ceiling is fogged with pollution and the smeared, desperate fingertips of the rapist in the Oval Office and all his cronies. The prospect of having a fulfilling career is muddled by the fear that someone might not like the work I’m doing and bring a gun to my office to punish me and my colleagues.

Although I know better, it feels as though things have gone off the rails very quickly. As I come of age and into adulthood, my once-chemical anxieties have taken root in reality. With a new job, I feel like my life is starting to take shape, but that victory has merely made room for more real worries—when before I was racked by depression at being unfulfilled, I now work someplace meaningful and can redirect my idle time to worrying about the Great Big Ugly Future. Our parents didn’t worry about shit like this, did they?

In solidarity, always, no matter how anxious,

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Being a Young Woman in 2019”:

The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color ed. Cherrie L. Moraga

This is a Post about Identity

If you haven’t already heard, today is the first day of my new Big Girl Job. I wasn’t sure how to write about this because, aside from it being exciting news, I don’t have much to say yet. But then I had a tiny little epiphany and a blog post came to me.

In the midst of signing my formal acceptance and consenting to a background check and all the standard stuff, the hiring manager asked which first initial I wanted to use for my company email address, A for Alexis or L for Lexie. Professionally and academically, across the board, I’ve always gone by Alexis, although I grew up with everyone calling me Lexie. (Although I bristled in high school whenever anyone less than a best friend shortened “Lexie” to “Lex”.)

As an adult it seemed like it was time to shed my childhood nickname in favor of my legal name, which I guess I think sounds more professional. It always felt impersonal and foreign to hear people call me by my given name, but eventually most people got around to calling me Lexie anyway when we got to know each other well enough. Y’know…how nicknames work.

At my job in retail, I used Alexis as a defense mechanism, purposefully impersonal because I didn’t plan to stick around long. Go figure, the longer I was there, the more people started calling me Lexie. It kind of felt like that meant I’d been there too long, but really it just meant I was making friends. Not that serious, dummy. But that’s how I felt, and this job offer came at just the right time to get me out of a place I never planned to become familiar.

Even if I don’t stay at this job for my entire career, I feel so lucky to have found what feels like the perfect place to start. It’s a nonprofit, so the people working there are doing it for the love of the job, not to make big money. It’s reading and literacy focused work, which is the exact kind of thing I want to be doing. There are a dozen people on staff, including me, and they eat lunch together outside when the weather is nice. As far as I can tell, none of them are republicans. And they are as excited about me as I am about them. It’s an amazing feeling.

I don’t know if there’s a lesson here, except that I’m grateful this job found me when it did, because I was feeling ready to give up (again). The job hunt was hard on my ego, and especially so thanks to a brutal winter that ramped up my depression ten-fold. Like I did when I graduated high school and was anxiously preparing to go off to college, I feel like I should be blasting “Shake it Off” by Florence & the Machine and dancing around my bedroom.

This is a short post and I’m glad for it. It’s refreshing to share good news and leave it at that.

Tomorrow is my 23rd birthday. I feel good.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Identity”:

“The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson

This is a Post About Joy in Grief

The last Christmas my paternal grandma was alive, she leaned over to my sister and I at the dinner table and said, kind of quietly but with the confidence only old people have, “These noodles look like vaginas.”

I’d heard her say plenty of naughty things over the years, but never vagina. Jesus. The three of us—and everyone who overheard—lost it. What an unbelievably inappropriate and true thing to say on the day of our lord, grandma Gretch. She was fun like that.

I feel like I’m getting to know her better now that she’s gone, which is a shame. But I think it’s because I’m becoming more and more like her as I get older, and I’m told I look like her, which is great because she was a fox. She was funny. Maybe I’m funny!

One of my most vivid memories with my Grandma Gretch is sitting on the daybed at her house eating mindlessly from a massive bowl of potato chips and watching hours and hours of Land before Time. Grandma would sit in a glider and fall asleep, and then she’d fart and wake herself up and blame the fart on me. 

When she died I was a junior in high school and on the brink of a mental breakdown. I think maybe her death triggered my stumble into clinical depression, or maybe it was just coincidental. I was very sad and anxious and refused to go to her wake, which upset my sister a lot and probably others in my family. I would say I regret it, but I don’t, because that decision taught me a lot about grief. My maternal grandpa’s death taught me a lot about grief, too, and so did working at a funeral home, but those are stories for another day.

Maybe I should have gone to my grandma’s wake. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go because I didn’t want to see and remember her in a casket. It wasn’t because I’m an asshole and a terrible granddaughter. I just…didn’t want to go. I was sad, and so anxious that I felt sick, and going anywhere—especially somewhere explicitly sad—would not have helped me grieve or feel better. My family honoring that choice, though it was a battle hard-won that made me feel terrible initially, was a good exercise in autonomy and listening to my gut.

Most religions have pretty strict—or at least faithfully followed—death rituals. I was raised Catholic which meant there’d be a wake, where we’d all look at the body of the deceased and be sad about it, then a funeral the next day where we’d do pretty much the same thing, but with a mass and then a burial and then a sad, weird lunch in a church basement.

I hate funerals. Most people do. They don’t bring me closure. They don’t make me feel better. They feel arbitrarily ritualized and very rarely do a good job of honoring the deceased (more on that another time). It feels performative, but necessary, and bucking against those rituals feels sacrilegious and rude. I guess maybe it is.

So I skipped my grandma’s wake, and I’m sure nobody really cared all that much in the end. It wasn’t such a big deal. Grandma sure as shit didn’t care. She’d just as happily have had me at home eating potato chips and watching a cartoon if that’s what I wanted.

I didn’t even know my grandma was sick until she was really sick. Because my parents had divorced when I was very young, I rarely saw my father’s side of my family as I got older. Grandma and Grandpa came to visit and drop off magazines for my mom from time to time, and always sent a birthday card, but I didn’t spend nearly as much time with them as I wish I had. My big sister was closer with that side of the family, so she knew Grandma was in the hospital and that things weren’t looking good, and then she had to come home from college for the funeral.

I remember two things about my grandma’s funeral: first, that my grandpa cried very, very hard during the burial and I’d never seen him cry before (he cries a lot now, whenever he talks about her) and second, that after the luncheon everyone took home gallon Ziplock bags of leftover Polish sausage, and the Polish sausage was, like, the best I’d ever had.

What I remember more clearly is my Aunt Mickey’s funeral, which was a few years before Grandma Gretch’s. I was young when Mickey got sick and I didn’t know her terribly well, but she was silly and full of love and joy just like my grandma. Her daughters were my big sister’s age, and I used to go with my grandma when I was little to play with my cousins while grandma vacuumed and dusted with unmatched precision. (I think of her whenever I see crisp vacuum lines in a carpet.)

At Mickey’s funeral, the priest tripped over a rug on his way in, a member of the band made many horrible mistakes, and several other inconsequential but startling mishaps distracted us. I don’t remember who, but someone—my aunt Pam, probably—leaned over to me and whispered, “That’s Mickey,” in reference to all the ways things had gone off the rails. Of course, I thought. Her last gift was to make us laugh at her funeral. Like I said, I was raised Catholic. I don’t really know what I believe in now, but I believe in that.

What a lucky thing to have a family full of funny ladies who take care to make you laugh when you feel your very worst.

When Grandma Gretch died she left a shitload of costume jewelry for us to dig through. On that side of my family are five granddaughters, of which I am the baby, and one year at Thanksgiving or Christmas the five of us filed down to the basement to root through Rubbermaid totes of Grandma’s stuff to decide what we wanted to keep.

This death ritual—the doling out of the deceased’s belongings among family members—has always felt strange to me, but I guess it’s nice when there’s no bitterness about who gets the good crystal, or whatever. Anyway, I had little use for costume jewelry, so I got one of Grandma’s big chunky gold rings—which I never once remembered seeing on her arthritic hands—and, more importantly, an old pin with two Scottie dogs on it.

The pin is extremely ugly. It’s plastic, and it was once red but has since faded to a kind of dusty dark orange, and the heads of the two Scottie dogs spin 360 degrees, for some reason. I used to have it pinned to my backpack, but the pin part fell off—revealing several layers of superglue that had been applied to fix it once or twice before—and somehow I didn’t lose the little dogs. Now it lives in my purse, and it gets transferred from the fall/winter purse to the spring/summer purse with my wallet and tampons and hair elastics and all the rest. When I feel shitty I like to look at those two ugly dogs and think of my silly grandma and where in god’s name she would have possibly worn a pin like that.

It’s funny the things we remember about people when they’re gone. My memories of my grandma remind me of the scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams’ character is talking about his late wife:

“One night her fart was so loud it woke the dog up, she woke up and said, ‘Was that you?’ I said ‘Yeah.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell her. […] She’s been dead two years and that’s the shit I remember, wonderful stuff. These are the things I miss the most, these idiosyncrasies that only I know. That’s what made her my wife and she had the goods on me too. She knew all my peccadillos. People call these things imperfections… that’s the good stuff. “

When I think of my maternal grandpa, who I’ll write more about another time, I remember very vividly how he’d squeeze the back of my neck—affectionately, but always too hard—and ask, “Whaddaya know, Lexer?” And because I have always been an introvert and poor conversationalist, I’d say, “Not much” or “Nothing” and he’d laugh. I also think about the time I wandered around the yard pulling all the little leaves off the ferns in the raised beds because the way they slipped off in my hands felt so satisfying. When my grandpa saw the stripped fronds I could tell he was furious, and he asked me why I’d do something like that. I didn’t have an answer, of course. Nobody ever scolded me for it, which leads me to believe my grandpa kept it to himself (or at least told my mom and grandma to leave it alone), understanding that sometimes kids do dumb stuff for no reason. Like my grandma Gretch, I think of my grandpa when I see crisp, perfectly parallel lines of freshly cut grass.

Maybe what I’m getting at is that grief looks different to everyone, and in many ways I think I’ve been able to summon joy from it. Those idiosyncrasies, the funny, offbeat memories we have of the people we love are special. And though it shouldn’t take losing someone to reflect on and enjoy those memories, it sure helps when you’re missing them.

Here’s to the ones we miss. May your thoughts of them be full of whimsy and silliness.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Joy in Grief”:

Gilead by Marianne Robinson

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

This is a Post about Peter Pan

I feel inexplicably thirty, and I have for a long time. In reality I’m closer to twenty than I am to thirty, but years of certain comments will age you up mentally.

You’re an old soul.

You’re so mature for your age.

You’re wise beyond your years.

I guess, in a way, those things are kind of true. I had my brain stolen when I was sixteen, then my body at seventeen, and my family at eighteen. That sounds dramatic, I know, but grief wears you down.

Sylvia Plath wrote somewhere, “I feel old, but not very wise.” I concur.

(I can imagine my older readers rolling their eyes a little at this point. I know thirty is young, but when you’re barely breaching adulthood, it feels eons away. It feels like you can’t even imagine who you will be when you’re that age. It’s spooky!)

The prospect of getting older has always struck me dumb with terror. I call it Peter Pan Syndrome. While most of my peers were eager to seem older and be older, growing up has always felt like a punishment to me. Look close enough and you can find a photo of me on almost every birthday where I’m crying. My mom made a whole collage frame full of them for my high school graduation party. In hindsight, that’s undiagnosed anxiety triggered by too much attention on me, but also the great big fear of getting older.

Even from a young age my future always felt uncertain to me. I had a hard time making and keeping friends in grade school, and I worried a lot about how I was supposed to go through puberty and the whole gambit without at least one close pal by my side. But when I found my friend group in middle school, I was still afraid, which was made extra scary because I didn’t know what I was afraid of.

I remember very vividly the one time in my life I wanted desperately to be—or at least seem—older. I was twelve or thirteen years old, spending a lot of time on MySpace, and crushing aggressively on an eighth grader. I filled out a bulletin (remember those?) he posted called “Girlfriend Application” and after the blank for age I think I wrote 14 or 15. Like he couldn’t look in a yearbook and do a quick calculation if he really wanted. It would be my first job rejection. Who’d have thought!

MySpace bulletins also served as public forums to fill out quizzes or answer questions about yourself so that your friends could get to know you better. I remember one quiz I filled out asked whether I was more preppy or punk, and I wrote something like, “punk b*#%h!!!” and my big sister called me out for swearing. (This is a big deal at twelve years old.) I think I told her it was a typo, which, in hindsight, makes me laugh out loud. Later on, my aunt would join MySpace and ask why my profile said I was sixteen, and I’d tell her it was a “glitch”.

All this posturing to appear older, and for what? I think it was equal parts preteen identity crisis and wild, pubescent desire for male attention. I failed miserably at both, which was probably embarrassingly apparent to my close friends watching it all unfold from a distance, although we were all doing the same dumb shit then.

But then my hormones eventually mellowed out and I settled into a standard of existential dread, and here we are today.

Later on, when it came time for me to apply to colleges I had been diagnosed with anxiety and depression for about a year, so the fear kind of made sense. But between financial aid and trying to choose a major and even settling on a campus, I remember weeping to my mom regularly, “I don’t know what to do.”

I picked my university basically at random. In fact, I never even got to take a campus tour because a blizzard stood between home and the tour we were scheduled to go on, and we never rescheduled. The first time I saw my campus was on orientation day, a couple months before move-in. (Pro tip: If you’re someone crippled by anxiety, don’t take this route. It’s dumb and shortsighted and will make you feel like the sky is falling.)

After a couple weeks of debilitating homesickness, I got comfortable enough, and ultimately stayed there through graduation. Even dating in college was a headache at best. I used dating apps like Tinder to meet people, but when it came down to actually meeting in person for a date I backed out, too anxious to actually pursue anything real. The attention was nice, but the prospect of actually engaging in an adult relationship? Nightmarish. The line I got regularly, which had already lost any power it may have had when I was in high school, was, “You’re so mature for your age.” I don’t even know what that means, except that I think it makes older guys feel better about hitting on barely-legal girls.

When I dated a guy I met in my dorm, I liked to imagine what life would be like for us after we graduated and we miraculously settled into our careers. Our relationship was deeply boring—mostly we just made out and watched The Office and sometimes went to parties where he expertly led me away, his hand on the small of my back, when the cops came—and imagining us as Grown-Ups was much more fun. We could move out west and he would be a park ranger! I could write novels in our little cabin in the mountains! We could have a billion dogs! Probably not kids, because he wasn’t really interested in that, but wouldn’t they be so cute if they inherited his curly hair?

The other shoe dropped when my mom and grandma came to pick me up for a weekend at home and, when I asked if he wanted to meet them, he said no. Very un-thirty-ish. So that relationship didn’t last long.

Even my current partner told me once, when we were sitting at a picnic table outside my dorm after class, that I seemed so mature for nineteen. I think he could see something in my eyes because he added quickly, cautiously, “Is that weird to say?” In hindsight, I could kick him for saying that to me, but knowing who he is and who we are together, I understand his meaning was, basically, “Thank god she’s not going to ask me to go to house parties.” We are the same that way, which is why it’s been working out so well. I can imagine us, realistically, in our thirties, because it looks a lot like how we are now, but maybe with some rugrats and a stable job on my end.

I think the best year of my life, so far, was my last year at my university, and so I’m grateful I was able to stick it out, bad dates and clichés and all. That community, once chosen at random, now means the world to me. I hope when I’m really thirty I’m back there starting my family.

The other side of the coin is that I am, really and truly, not your typical early-twenty-something. Sometimes I wish I were thirty so, when my coworkers ask me to go to the bars after work, I could say, “The kids have soccer tonight!” instead of fumbling for some excuse that sounds better than, “No, thanks. I don’t…want to.” My ideal Saturday is spent ping-ponging between antique stores with my partner and maybe grabbing dinner somewhere before we go home and sit on the couch to watch a beloved movie for the fifth time.

I guess this means my brain is thirty—that is, settled into an extremely comfortable, mundane routine—but my body is still twenty-two and appears as though I should be having raucous fun. I don’t want the responsibilities and pressures of thirty, but the illusion of adjusted-ness is appealing. (I don’t think thirty is a magic number where everyone figures their lives out. In fact, I see a trend of people not “figuring things out” until they’re much older, and thirty looks much like eighteen or twenty-five, in the grand scheme of things. Thirty, here, is mostly a symbol. Sub in forty if it makes you more comfortable. Stick with me, here.)

I am a June baby, which means when I graduated high school I was still seventeen and I was the last of my friends who could legally drink in college. In reality, it’s a few months’ difference in age between you and your peers, but being the baby of the group for so long maybe contributed to my fear of growing up.

At the same time, though, I have always been the “Mom Friend”. This means I get tipsy after a single beer and I’ll hold your hair when you puke and tell you to text me when you get home safe and, if we’re lucky and you listen, steer you away from some dumb guy who’s cosmically destined to waste your time and break your heart. I guess this is why I feel like a thirty-year-old baby.

Maybe thirty feels like an anchor. My life, at the moment, is a little tumultuous and uncertain, and so the mysticism of being thirty is that it means maybe things will be more stable. My brain and my spirit are ready for some stability, but the rest of me needs to catch up, because she’s probably secretly afraid of being a real-life grown up. Of having a mortgage. Of having a 401K. Of being stuck in a job she hates. Of finding herself in a job she loves, maybe. Of having a kid! Or two or three!

I suppose when you consider this conflict in me, the desire to make like Peter Pan and fly off to Never Never Land at odds with the desire to Be a Stable Adult, a lot of other stuff makes sense. My penchant for describing policy with Spongebob gifs, serious but still playful, comes back to all this. But certainly I’m not the only one.

Thank goodness I turn 23 this year. Seven years to go!

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Peter Pan”:

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Tonight I’m Someone Else: Essays by Chelsea Hodson

The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin’ Sad by Adam Gnade

This is a Post about Privilege

I got pulled over for speeding on Mother’s Day. 

I’ve never been pulled over before, save for the time I somehow turned off my brake lights after a homecoming dance and the officer, my neighbor, laughed at me as she fixed it and I fought back anxious tears. 

Anyway, my partner and I were on our way home after a weekend on the other side of the state visiting my family and then his for Mother’s Day. We stopped at the grocery store on our way back into town and then headed home, and while we were joking about using disguises to get into a retirement community, lights flashed in my rear view. I was going 40 in a 25, so…fair enough.

I’ve never had a ticket or an accident, so the officer gave me a warning and sent us on our way. 

It occurred to me that when other people get pulled over—black and brown people—their experiences are much different than mine. Sandra Bland was pulled over for failing to signal a lane change and ended up dead in a jail cell. As we sat waiting for the officer to run my license or whatever, I glanced down at my purse and my hands in my lap and thought about how if I were black I might have my hands up on my dash, my purse in back so it wouldn’t look like I was concealing something in it. Maybe my passenger would have his hands on the dash too, would have taken off his ball cap.

But instead my partner made a joke about how we’d been listening to a Kendrick Lamar song when I pulled over and the likelihood that it included a line condemning police brutality.

I’ve been pretty openly critical and distrustful of cops, not because of how they’ve treated me but because of the rampant brutality they’ve gotten away with for decades and probably centuries. Here is a quick lesson in empathy: just because someone is decent to you, it does not mean they are decent to everyone, or decent period. You are within your rights to be critical of how they treat others, because that speaks volumes about their character.

Anyway, the officer who pulled me over on Mother’s Day was fine. He looked like he was my age and seemed to be trying really hard to assert his authority, which was annoying, but he asked me to slow down and let me go with a warning and without, I don’t know, beating the shit out of me in the street, so it was fine. I’d like to think he treated us the way he treats everyone else he pulls over. But rumors that the police department in our town is generally shitty and unhelpful kind of makes me doubt it.

I wrote a paper in college about rap and racism, and I’m quite proud of it. (Although I acknowledge time and again that a white girl analyzing blackness in America is probably helpful to no one, at the very least it may mean that some other white person who hasn’t thought about it will stop to listen to me and then be more respectful of what black and brown people have to say.) Anyway, I’m going to slap some of that in here, because I think some folks outside my academic bubble could stand to hear it.

Rapper Kendrick Lamar’s music routinely makes observations and asks difficult questions on behalf of Black America. Lamar’s powerful—and controversial, to some viewers—Grammy Awards performance in 2016 featured a chain gang, prison cells, and a mashup of his songs “The Blacker the Berry” and “Alright.” “The Blacker the Berry,” which opens with the line “I’m the biggest hypocrite of 2015,” is both a commentary on police brutality and Lamar’s youth in Compton. He expresses guilt as he looks back and wonders, “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street?/When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me?/Hypocrite!” Lamar takes the typical conservative response to critiques of police brutality—“but what about black-on-black crime?”—and subverts the narrative. The earlier line, “You sabotage my community, making a killing/You made me a killer/Emancipation of a real nigger” uses his experience to explain how all this is interconnected, because the roots of gang violence lead directly back to systemic racism. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who grew up in West Baltimore but expresses many of the same concerns, writes of recent murders committed by police: “the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body” (9). Although Hunter S. Thompson is white, his position as a social outcast during the War on Drugs makes him privy to police misconduct. He subverts stereotypes of addict behavior to highlight abuse of power and suggests, given the opportunity, “these cops will go fifty bucks a head to beat [Lucy] into submission and then gang-fuck her” (114). Much like Coates and Thompson, Lamar uses images of the body to describe his experience.

His latest album, DAMN., is no exception. Perhaps the most powerful features on DAMN. are the clips from news reports. The first track, “BLOOD.” closes with FOX News commentator Geraldo Rivera remarking, “Lamar stated his views on police brutality with that line in the song [‘Alright’], quote ‘And we hate the po-po/Wanna kill us in the street fo’ sho’,” to which the reporter’s co-host responds, with palpable disgust, “Oh, please. Ugh, I don’t like it.” On the second track, “DNA,” Lamar’s verse is interrupted with Rivera stating, “This is why I say that hip hop has done more damage to young African Americans than racism in recent years.” These audio clips are presented, basically, without comment, but are a clear condemnation of the tone-deaf media coverage of violence and race in America. Non-black newscasters deciding they “don’t like” evocative lyrics written by a black artist is just a single example of everyday micro-aggressions which dismiss blackness without authority or consideration. Political commentators and newscasters have long expressed discomfort with black anger, either explicitly or less conspicuously, using language like “thug” to describe the young men shot dead by police in the street. On the track “FEAR.,” Lamar predicts, “I’ll prolly die from one of these bats and blue badges/Body-slammed on black and white paint, my bones snappin’.” The fear and violence associated with existence, regardless of class or social status, is understood universally by black Americans. It is a sense of solidarity that, from coast to coast, the black experience is uniquely compromised by the unchecked power of others, primarily white people. Coates, a Lamar fan, tweeted a line from “YAH.”—“I got so many theories and suspicions”—to announce his 2017 book on the Obama administration, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (Kyles). On the same song, Lamar says, “FOX News wanna use my name for percentage…Somebody tell Geraldo this nigga got some ambition,” a callback to the clips used on earlier tracks and a more direct reminder that media tactics don’t go unnoticed.  Small endorsements and supportive gestures like this are a reminder of the interconnectivity of black artists specifically, who are hyperconscious of their positions and how they can be used to uplift those in the underserved communities of their youth.

Although pundits’ opinions on black art have a huge, public platform, they are not the only ones exercising their first amendment rights to comment on the experience of others. Rapper Vince Staples’ song “Norf Norf” about growing up in Northside Long Beach, triggered an eleven-minute video of a white mother angrily tearing up over the lyrics—specifically, the main line of the chorus: “I ain’t never ran from nothin’ but the police.” This reaction video went viral, and it’s certainly not the first time someone has reacted negatively to rap. There’s an ongoing national dialogue about rap music and what it can and cannot be or sound like. The woman in the video, unlike Geraldo Rivera, was more concerned about the violent nature of the song and disrespecting police than about Vince Staples’ blackness, although the song reveals the implicit connection between the two. Staples is known for pushing the envelope and being something of an oddball in the rap game, so his response was highly anticipated. And then when he responded thoughtfully and defended the woman in the video, folks following the story were pleasantly surprised. When his reaction was misquoted by the Independent, Staples tweeted: “the woman in that video is clearly confused on the context of the song which causes her to be frightened.” The dialogue had, in this instance, become that: a dialogue. He went on to tweet: “No person needs to be attacked for their opinion on what they see to be appropriate for their children,” as well as, “This misunderstanding of our community leads to miscommunication which we should convert into a progressive dialogue.” The shock of this response reveals how easily we underestimate the nuanced, sympathetic ideas of those whose art we consume; we expect a more volatile response, one that is in line with the frustration expressed in the music or our expectations about the behavior of rappers. This kind of social diplomacy from artists, more often than not, far outperforms that of our elected officials—and even most of us—who are reflexively decisive. In this instance, Staples, like Coates, is both artist and commentator, taking control of a narrative that otherwise seeks to control him. Like [Hunter S.] Thompson, he holds police officers accountable for their ugliest tendencies.

I guess what I’m getting at is that we all have to take a good, hard look at our privilege. It’s uncomfortable. It doesn’t feel good to know people in authority positions treat you differently—namely, better—than people whose skin is darker than yours. We know racism is not “over” in America, and pretending it is when black people continue to die in police custody and black and brown and Jewish houses of worship get shot up is profoundly shitty. Whether you’re young or old, you don’t get to turn a blind eye to this. You can say that times have changed and that people nowadays are so sensitive, but we see through it. We know that means you’re being intellectually lazy. You’d rather continue on as you always have than address the parts of your life that make it harder for people of color to make a life for themselves.

Maybe you’re scared of change, because change might disrupt the comfortable way you’ve always lived your life. Gimme a break. The greatest resistance to social progress, let’s be real, comes from older white people who are afraid people of color will…what? Be able to have what they have? I know your generation has worked hard to see gay people and black people and women beaten into the dirt for trying to have what you have—jobs that pay a living wage, a roof over their heads, food to eat, education, etc., etc.—but here’s the thing: you’re wrong. And a great many people are sick of watching federal and state institutions treat real, living people like shit. So buck up. I know you can do it. Read a book or something. Or at the very least, shut up.

Clearly, subjugated people have a track record of refusing to accept the scraps they’re given. The way I see it, we have two choices: start treating people like people, or continue on as we have since the British killed most of the indigenous people here and keep on trying to stamp out people who challenge us. It seems really simple to me, so I can’t wrap my brain around why some people are so insistent on wasting our time and resources being absolute assholes. We’ve been at it for hundreds of years, so clearly it’s not working.

Can you tell I’m mad?

Anyway, every single day white—or straight, or cis, or able-bodied, or middle class, or college-educated—people have at least one opportunity, probably, to address our privilege. Just sit and think on it a little. It’s the least you can do in the year of 2019 as someone who wants a future for your kids or grandkids or whatever. And if you’re reading this and scoffing because I’m an outspoken young person with no life experience and no sense of reality, please exit. I don’t want ya here. I’ve given you the last of my patience. Bye.

Everyone else, thanks for hanging with me. We can do better. Hop to it.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Privilege”:

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

This is a Post about a Catch-22

A couple months ago my partner’s school had a presenter talk to the students about internet safety. I guess the presenter talked about how easy it is to find information about people online, which led to my partner’s students finding my public Twitter account and being dumb enough to let my partner hear about it.

Although I don’t really mind it—it’s public, so what did I expect?—my partner felt our privacy was massively invaded and told his students so. They felt really bad, because they’re kids and not monsters, and I put my account on private for a while to keep them out.

Despite my love for Twitter and the community it’s given me, I have a complicated relationship with it. I consider myself a pretty mature person with thoughtful opinions and nuanced ideas, but I’m also in my twenties and feel adamantly that tweeting things like “I fucking hate Nazis” is well within my rights, whether I’m sixteen or sixty five. That’s not the kind of thing I would feel uncomfortable about having young impressionable minds see, but my career doesn’t depend on what students and their parents think is appropriate for students to see, even totally separate from school.

This invasion of privacy made me re-evaluate how I use social media and kind of made me feel like a big dummy. Generally I really like the person I am and the things I believe. I don’t know how mature it is to tweet about hating Nazis, but certainly it’s not an objectionable idea. People I admire ten years my senior say wilder shit and have fruitful careers in journalism and politics and education and whatever else. I feel like there’s a glaring false equivalency between maturity and archaic notions of decorum that’s at odds in my brain when I think critically about my internet use.

If my most vulgar tweets are about how fascists suck and I wish they didn’t exist in my country, that doesn’t seem like something anyone should get upset about. Could I say it very politely and eloquently, like I’m writing a paper to turn into a professor? Sure. But I’m pissed off, and if being openly pissed off about neo Nazis is objectionable then I don’t really want to buy into those norms.

To be fair, I also share stuff like, “Will just farted in the car and it smelled so bad we almost crashed.” If I were a teacher I probably wouldn’t want my students to see stuff like that, innocuous as it may be.

I don’t think my partner is embarrassed by it, or at least he hasn’t said so. He thinks the dumb stuff I share online is as funny as I do, most of the time. I think the crux of the issue is this: I’m not a teacher, so I should be able to post whatever I damn well please without negative consequences for him, and his students should recognize that if they’re going to peek into his private life they should be respectful of it. But they’re kids, and they’re still figuring that kind of stuff out, so we get it.

A big part of why I share my life online is because I want very badly for my epiphanies and the lessons I learn to mean something to someone else who’s trying to figure it out. I have always been the “mom” friend, I helped raise my two younger siblings, and I have spent a lifetime giving friends advice because I guess my personality lends itself to providing wisdom (Ha!). I want to be Big Sister to the world. And in some ways I think I have been with people from high school who graduated a year or two or three after me. At the very least, if I share something stupid I did and someone else—younger or older or whatever—feels ashamed about having done the same stupid thing, we can both feel better that we’re not alone in it.

Basically my philosophy is that growing up is an enormous series of minor fuck-ups and if everyone just admitted we’re all trying to figure it out we’d be better for it. And I guess because my partner can’t say that in the classroom because he has state and federally mandated obligations to get these students through school, maybe if they stumble across that wisdom on my Twitter they will feel better about being lost.

Since the incident with the students happened, I have re-publicized my Twitter account and started this blog, which means that a persistent student may still be following along with my commentary online. We haven’t heard about it, though, so it’s fine. I’m not uncomfortable with it, and so long as my partner doesn’t feel like his students are going to give him shit about farting in the car or whatever, he probably doesn’t care either. You see, students, when you learn to creep quietly but respectfully, you can get away with a great deal of snooping. Plus, you can get all my unfiltered wisdom and imagine I am your cool big sister, or whatever. Your teacher can’t talk politics in the classroom, but I certainly can shout it into the void!

Tweeting my opinions has gotten me into trouble before, namely with university administration my last semester of college. When admin proposed a bullshit budget plan to deal with an enormous deficit, I spoke my mind about their incompetence. They didn’t like that, even when it was a joke involving a Spongebob screencap, and told me or my mentor (cowards!) so whenever they were especially upset about it. I think it cost me a thousand dollar grant to work with the press in the English department over the summer. So be it. Being vocal about what matters to you is worth the risk if it means protecting important values in your community. If you see injustice and you don’t say anything for fear of retribution, you’re kind of a wimp. In this political climate, we can’t afford to be wimpy. Get a little loud. The worst they can do is slap you on the wrist. In the end, it makes you look like a cool leader of the revolution and them look like The Man in a really scabby, uncool way.

Anyway, I know it’s presumptuous to think that anything I have to say is worthwhile advice to teenagers or anyone else. But, like I said, I like who I am, and I think more people could stand to feel the same way about themselves. When we buck social expectations in favor of being genuine, I think life gets a little more tolerable. If you can be yourself in all the weird and ugly ways and get comfortable doing that, all the choices you make feel more genuine. You stop feeling like all your Instagram posts have to be deep or whatever. If you feel good, share the selfie you just spent twenty minutes trying to get. Who cares? You’re allowed to feel good, and people like sharing in that. (Unless they’re jerks, in which case they just have some work to do with them that has nothing to do with you. Most people, though, will comment that you are a queen and an icon and they will be doing so with genuine love and support, because they want to see you happy).

The whole point of this blog and most of the content I spew out into the void of the internet is to share my folly in hopes that it makes you feel more human. Being a person is hard! Growing up sucks! The movies make it look like all the shitty stuff eventually passes and you learn all these great lessons and get rewarded for your efforts, but that’s not always the case. It’s okay, though. Nobody’s living that movie life, not really. And if being candid about it means people know about the embarrassing shit I did and still do, that’s fine.

Remember: it doesn’t help anyone to feel shame about the difficult things we go through.

Think of it this way: it’s like not knowing what you deserve to be paid unless you know what your peers are being paid. Social norms tell us it’s inappropriate to talk about money, but that comes from decades and centuries of businesses wanting to keep their employees in the dark so they can pay them less than they deserve. The same applies to shame. Once you know that someone you admire pooped their pants at the airport or tripped on the stage at graduation or, for frick’s sake, has stretch marks, you can enjoy a little sigh of relief.

Nobody has it all figured out. We’re just pretending. And the sooner we say, “Y’know what, pretending sucks and I’m sick of feeling inadequate because someone I haven’t seen in five years has a really well-curated Instagram feed,” the better we feel about figuring things out on our own timeline.

Long story short, if you’re reading this, you’re doing just fine. Even if we don’t know each other, I’m rooting for you, and even if you’re reading this blog in Mr. R’s classroom like a sneaky little scoundrel, you can trust us both because we want the best for you, even if one of us can’t really say everything he wants to say in a professional capacity.

Tell your best friend about the time you peed in the pool or wear the clothes you like even if you don’t look like a Victoria’s Secret Angel (nobody does!). You’re doing alright.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about a Catch-22”:

Mosquitoland by David Arnold

Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

This is a Post about RIVRGRL

By my estimation, ninety percent of vanity plates are corny and lame, but recently in my city I saw the license plate RIVRGRL and it made me smile. I guess that’s because I’m a river girl myself, although I never really thought about it much before.

I grew up in Northeast Wisconsin along the Oconto River—called “The Pond” in the town where I was raised—which gives way to the Machickanee Flowage before it slims out again and makes its way to Lake Michigan. Near my grandparents’ home I explored the Pensaukee, a scrawny little river that splits off in every direction and winds all around the county.

In my hometown my friends and I rode bikes to spend summers at the east side beach. The west side beach was more secluded, but was a much longer bike ride, had less beach, and was better suited as a boat landing. We heard stories about how high schoolers around my big sister’s age used to jump from tree swings into the shallow water over there on the west side and shuddered at the rumored resulting injuries. Allegedly the rope had been taken down to avoid further injury, but if you took a boat out onto the river you could spot at least one along the shore, hanging from a tall tree.

When I was in high school, we’d clamber into the river with inner tubes and float along, baking in the sun, a time-honored tradition among both teenagers and adults.

People from surrounding towns came to the east side beach frequently, which elicited a territorial response from us locals, although we never did anything to make our discomfort known. I think it was mostly a performance among ourselves, the notion that our beach was something of a local attraction, which was about as exciting as things got in a town of two thousand.

On Labor Day weekend the docks at the beach were pulled up onto shore to signal the end of summer. Then when the river froze, it was dotted with ice fishing shanties way before the ice was thick enough and, into the spring, long after fisherman were advised to remove their gear.

I grew up in a paper mill town, which meant the mill’s history was inextricably linked with the river. I heard a story once about a (presumably southern) semi-truck driver picking up or dropping off at the mill who saw all the ice shanties on the frozen river and said, “It’s so sad about all those homeless people!” Of course, we thought it was hilarious. Looking back, I can’t list on one hand all the things that assumption and our response reveals about cultural divide. But that’s a story for another time.

In middle school, on Earth Day, my class visited the hydroelectric dam to learn about renewable energy. We wore hard hats as one of the workers shouted over the machinery to tell us how there was once a waterfall in the middle of our river but now it was a dam and provided energy for the city. I guess I have always been mystified by dams, and seeing one up close only made me more dumbfounded.

At the top of the dam was a boat landing and a few fishing docks set apart from a flat-rock and gravel walkway that led to the framework at the top of the dam. My friends and I liked to sit on those big rocks when the beach was too crowded or in the spring and fall when we couldn’t swim. We’d skip rocks and ignore the smell of dead fish and bristle whenever someone came near to fish. I sometimes stopped there with my dog to take a rest on our walks. It was maybe the best spot in town to catch the sunset.

As you’d expect, sometimes the dam was open fully and the water rushed through with a roar that seemed completely mismatched to the river we swam in just a mile to the west. Other days, it merely trickled.

In the winter, great gushes of river water froze at the top of the dam, impossibly, and stood suspended in motion. Knowing what little I know about dams and hydroelectric power, this phenomenon seems…wrong? But I saw it every winter and was and still am flabbergasted by its beauty and surrealism.

I live in the St. Croix River Valley now, which creates the border between western Wisconsin and Minnesota. From my side of the river I can see clear across to Minnesota, Sarah Palin style. The St. Croix is gorgeous, so much so that it’s protected by the National Park Service.

On the day my partner and I moved into our apartment here, I had taken a detour to our college town to meet with a professor about a project, adding an hour and a half to what is ordinarily a three and a half hour trip. By the time I got into town, I was exhausted. It was a hot day, and when I went to my meeting with my professor it was raining and took me twenty minutes to find a parking spot because the roads on campus were being patched.

But the first thing I saw when I got into town, just off Wisconsin exit 1, was the St. Croix sparkling beyond the off ramp in the early evening sun. I felt myself relax, and I smiled with the relief of having finally arrived.

Our city is a sort-of suburb of the Twin Cities, and as such, is home to a fair few wealthy businesspeople who commute to work in the Cities while enjoying residences in a quieter area. There are marinas along the river full of these business peoples’ sailboats and yachts. It reminds me of the touristy, wealthy communities along Lake Michigan where the endless watery horizon can trick the brain into thinking you’re on the ocean.

Currently, the St. Croix has flooded so significantly so as to submerge about 60% of our riverside park and much of First Street. About ten miles south of our city the St. Croix feeds into the mighty Mississippi, which has also risen menacingly this spring.

Before my first interview properly in the Twin Cities, I got to sit by the Mississippi and feel small. It was fall, and I got to St. Paul an hour early in an overabundance of caution, and I found Harriet Island Park nearly empty. I was underdressed for the breeze in my interview outfit, but sitting on a bench and watching the Mississippi flow with downtown St. Paul set just behind it was surreal. River boats along the banks made it look strange, like I was on a movie set before any of the cast or crew appeared. It was the first moment in my new surroundings that I felt small-town-me easing into what may eventually become big-city-me. And it reminded me of the passage about rivers that, in many ways, brought me to the Twin Cities in the first place.

As a senior at UW – Stevens Point (Stevens Point is on the Wisconsin River) I took one of the classes that set me on course to be a big book nerd forever. In that class I was elected copy editor, which meant I got to spend hours poring over the manuscript of the very first book I would ever edit. The abstract idea of it was as intoxicating as the physical act of it. The book, The Appointed Hour by Susanne Davis, was and is my baby. If I haven’t bullied you into buying a copy yet, consider it done now.

The passage goes like this:

“In the southeast corner of Connecticut, three rivers flow and meet. First, the Shetucket makes a semicircular sweep and receives the Quinebaug and then together they join the Thames, flushing water into this once wild tract of land nine miles square. Of the three, I love the Quinebaug River most, coming as it does with a rapid current through a hilly country, channeling its way around ledges, spraying foam and diving headlong over the parapet of rock, free for a moment, then caught, a reminder to me that even nature faces encumbrances.”

Perfect.

It may be hard to believe, but Netflix was new at one point, and I remember my first experiences with it like I do my first experiences with the internet. (Hang in there—I promise I’ll get back to the river stuff.) Like most people, we just had the DVD-in-the-mail service at first, but eventually added the streaming service as well. In those early days, Netflix’s streaming options were 30% obscure indie films nobody has ever heard of, 50% Korean dramas, and 20% anime. It was slim pickings as far as my interests were concerned, but giving all those strange indie movies a try is cemented in my memory. The first movie I remember watching was called Dandelion, and years later, when Orange is the New Black came out, I’d see one of the main actresses from Dandelion in a much bigger production. Wild!

Anyway, another of the first movies I streamed was called Sixteen to Life, about a teenage girl living on the Mississippi River, reading about Mao and working at an ice cream stand inundated by tourists. The plot deals as much with her teenager-hood—it takes place on her sixteenth birthday, and everyone is giving her shit about being “sweet sixteen and never been kissed”—as it does with the transient nature of tourist towns. The wealthy kids who spend summers at their river houses are rude to her when she serves them at the ice cream stand, and the eventual love-interest is a tourist she may never see again. And so on.

What I’m saying is that, for me, Sixteen to Life was the original RIVRGRL! Here was a girl around my age, kind of weird but well-meaning and trying to figure it all out, who was growing up influenced by the existence of a river. She was fictional, but surely me and all the other RIVRGRLS in the world were having much the same experience and looking longingly to our rivers expectantly. But typically only the ocean gets the grand ennui representation in movies and songs and poems. So here was this movie about something less grand and, I guess, more universal.

I loved that movie. I found it again recently to watch it again—it’s on Amazon, and you should watch it, too—and I still love it. It still means everything to me it did when I was twelve or whatever and combing through mostly crappy options for wasting my time. Maybe it’s cringe-inducingly-millennial that a freaking Netflix movie helped my identity take shape, but that’s where we’re at in the grand scheme of things, so get over it. What Sixteen to Life gave me was assurance that my very ordinary life in a little river town could be special even if it wasn’t terribly interesting to anyone else.

When I think of the rivers that have raised me and nudged me along into the defining moments of my life so far I wonder what it is that makes them special to me. If I wanted to write something beautiful I’d say it has something to do with how they carry on despite those encumbrances. But I want to write something true, and if it’s beautiful that’s just incidental.

I think I love rivers because they are old and sometimes smelly and they are landmarks in my memory. They don’t care if you’re a local or slightly less local from a neighboring town and they don’t care if you pee in them. Rivers are like the oceans without all the mystical majesty. They are humble and accessible and were there long before you or me and will be there long after we die. They dictate how cities are built because they can’t be moved, and when you drive on the windy streets of a river city you can’t help but notice the way humans have catered in a small way to their existence. I suppose they’re poetic in a kind of dirty, diamond-in-the-rough way. They are the working class of bodies of water, maybe.

Then again, the Great Lakes have informed much of my character and Midwestern-ness, but that’s a post for another time.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about RIVRGRL”:

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

The Appointed Hour by Susanne Davis

The Flatness and Other Landscapes by Michael Martone

This is a Post about How I Love the World

I got the most wonderful phone call at work recently.

This is a rarity, not because we get rude phone calls but because it’s a store, so the job usually just involves answering mundane questions. For example, the call I got immediately after the Wonderful Phone Call was from a man inquiring whether we carry salt and vinegar pork rinds. (We don’t.)

Anyway, I avoid answering the phone as much as possible because I have always hated talking on the phone to anyone less familiar than my mom. But I’m glad I was on phone duty when this call came in, because when I answered with, “Thank you for calling [store], this is the operator. How can I help you?” the response came from a teenager asking if, for National Poetry Day, she and a few other students could read me some poems.

Instantly, I said, “Sure!” and in the little cubby behind the fitting room I tucked the phone between my ear and my shoulder and listened while I hung up clothes.

The phone on the other end was very efficiently passed around a group of four kids who were each introduced before they read an original poem or one by a poet they like. Their original poems were about driving cars really fast down country roads on weekend nights and the friend who got too drunk at the party. I was enamored, but I kept thinking, I hope someone else doesn’t call in the middle of this. To have to cut them off to answer a call about swim trunks or Dot’s pretzels would break my heart.

Luckily, they got through all their poems and we thanked one another and hung up.

I had been having a pretty average day—fine, but not particularly great—but it had been brightened instantly. I couldn’t stop thinking about how lucky it was that I had been the one to answer the call, not because my other coworkers would have been rude to these kids, but because the call so richly fed my soul. The thought crossed my mind that I love the world for moments like those.

It’s hard to be an even remotely aware person these days and find pockets of joy like this. There are times when you are happy, to be sure, but usually because something has made you laugh or you’re high off an impulse purchase or you won a scratch-off game. That happiness is valid and nourishing but it’s fleeting. Happiness like the poetry phone call brought me, however, tapped into the part of my brain that reminded me that there are sweet, thoughtful people in the world who do things because they spread joy. What a wonder.

Maybe those kids hate poetry but their English teacher wanted them to do it. That’s fine, because the English teacher knew whoever answered would probably feel better after talking to her students. Maybe the kids love poetry and love sharing it, or hate sharing it but find it easier to share with a stranger they may never meet. In any event, the students I spoke to were pleasant and polite and very talented, and since I’m still thinking about weeks later, I am so glad they happened to dial my store’s number.

The phrase “how I love the world” in the title of this post is one I’ve stolen from my aunt and godmother, who, the older I get, the more I admire and seek to please. My godmother read my post about feeling estranged from my family and wrote a long, thoughtful comment, sharing a funny anecdote from when I was too young to remember and, referring to trying to be good in a world full of bad, using the phrase “this is how I love the world.” Clearly, like the phone call, it has stuck with me.

I love the world for the classrooms of students, bored and enthusiastic, who do projects which amount to a net positive. It doesn’t matter if they care at all, because the result is the same. I love the world for flowers in the spring and the tiny biodegradable container of cherry tomatoes on my patio which has miraculously germinated a single seed. It probably won’t last or produce any tomatoes, but seeing that sprout made me gasp in earnest at my luck. 

I love the world for turns of phrase which stick with you and make you think about how they apply to you. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned as an English major is that unnecessarily elevated language is phooey, and using words most everyone can understand to share important and complicated ideas is a much more effective way of communicating. Being eloquent is appropriate at times, but speaking to each other on level ground rather than waxing poetic is an expression of love. It says, “I see you and I love you and so I am going to talk to you in a way that makes us both comfortable. I want to share with you.”

I love the world for public transit and for people who come into the store with reusable bags, for Greta Thunberg choosing valiantly to carry the world on her shoulders so that the rest of us and our children and grandchildren may live to see a healthy planet.

I love the world for books and movies and songs that make me cry. I love to cry because it feels good to get all that pressure out of your body, even if it makes my nose swell to twice its normal size.

I love the world for ALDI, where you put a quarter in a little red box to release the cart from the corral so everyone does their part to keep the store and the parking lot clean, and if you want to use plastic bags you have to pay for them. I love jogging to catch someone’s attention over the roar of the cart’s wheels on the pavement to say, “I’ll take your cart,” and handing them my quarter. I love that when we get in the car after getting groceries, my partner checks the quarter we got to see which state is on the back.

I love French toast on Sundays while we watch CBS Sunday Morning. I love seeing the different birds come to our feeder throughout the seasons, and the chubby squirrels who once ate every vegetable scrap I threw out and now are spoiled and finicky. I loved watching our electricity bill drop forty dollars from February to March because we finally broke free of subzero days. I love that our apartment is built slightly into a hill and we never have to use the air conditioner, even on the hottest days of the summer.

I love that there are times in my life, like after the poetry phone call, which remind me just how much I love the world and its small, simple gifts. Reading the news is hard.  Watching your city’s downtown flood after record-breaking snowfalls melt in the spring is hard. Looking outside the window for four months at record-breaking snow and gray skies is hard. It all clings to you like leeches and saps your energy and joy.

When I need perspective or to ingest media that doesn’t make my brain hurt, I like to watch cooking shows or nature documentaries. Every episode of “Our Planet” and “Planet Earth” has made my jaw drop, astonished by the beauty and strangeness in the world that is almost always so interesting it seems like it can’t be real. Of course, there are the sad parts to remind us that the planet is dying and it’s all our fault, but the rest is an incentive to be better. Look at what we can save if we each just work a little harder at being good. It doesn’t even take much energy or commitment or investment; it’s just a choice to shift your behaviors a little. Not to mention that doing good stuff feels good!

I love that even the toughest things for me to write or say render responses that make it feel worth saying, that getting the hurt out makes it easier for other people to get theirs out, too.

I love that love is an overflowing, renewable resource and that it’s free and easy to give even if it can be hard to receive. For a long time I was afraid to say “I love you” or to say that I loved anything for fear that it would make me vulnerable. But I’ve learned that I’m very good at being vulnerable, and very good at loving. I think most of us probably are, if we just relax our shoulders a little and say, “To hell with it!” Your “I love you” stores are like a natural spring still untouched by greedy human hands; it will remain full no matter how many times you drink from it.

Anyway, I love you, reader, and kids who read me poetry, and every butthead and angel in between. Thanks for existing.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about How I Love the World”:

My Antonia by Willa Cather

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg

 “Giraffe” by Bryony Littlefair

This is a Post about All my Friends I’ve Never Met, Part 2

I had initially intended for this to be a single post, but it got unwieldy and so I decided to split into two major eras in my life. Each is ultimately tethered to the other despite how wildly different they are. In any event, please enjoy the more recent story of my life with internet friends.

What my deep dive into the internet eventually led me to was a host of lasting relationships rooted in what is commonly described as “stan Twitter”. The term “stan” derives from the Eminem song of the same name, and it describes an obsessive fan of a celebrity. Early in high school, I joined Twitter because I was—still proudly am!—a One Direction stan, and although I’m not active in the fizzling fandom anymore, I have that experience to thank for my closest friendships.

I think, without Second Life, I’d have never felt comfortable opening up to strangers online. And in many ways, Second Life was a way more intimate way to do so than in exchanging tweets about a boyband. But in any event, my love for said boyband introduced me to other likeminded individuals and we have grown up together on the internet in a way I suspect is very unique to our generation. In the same way my big sister made lasting friends in video game chatrooms and forums, I met my most cherished friends through instantaneous and multitudinous tweets about a boyband.

I remember the exact moments I met a lot of my close “Twitter friends” because they are well documented online. My oldest Internet friends are two girls from Canada who grew up together and joined the community together. My best friend and I exchanged Christmas gifts with them that first year of our friendship, being sure to mail our package to one of the girl’s houses so the other one’s parents wouldn’t be alarmed.

Around the same time, I got close to a girl from Venezuela, who now lives in the States thanks to a visa lottery. When a package full of Venezuelan chocolates showed up on my doorstep one day, I finally had to explain to my mom that, yeah, all my friends are in my computer.

In a TinyChat—in short, a group video call—with my Venezuelan and Canadian friends, I met a girl from Boston, and I still vividly remember that her long, curly hair was in two braids when I first saw her tiny picture.

Along the way I met two more young ladies in Canada, a girl in Texas, one in Michigan, two gals from New York, and tons more from across the States an even internationally, all united by this boyband. Many of us are not terribly close, but know of one another casually and follow along with each other’s lives. We shared in our obsession as teenagers and now are grown women, and the transition has been incredible to watch.

Many of the people I first met in the community are gone now, having moved onto greener pastures that don’t involve spending time with Twitter acquaintances. But many of us still remain close, separated from our past as “stans” but rooted together in that moment in our history.

Over the summer I got to meet my friend from Boston and one from New York for the first time, and although we worried it would be awkward, we were, after all, old friends. A lot of us have graduated college now and are starting our careers. We met in middle school and high school and are now finding ourselves at a brand new stage in our lives and we are all still desperate to finally meet one another in person. We send Christmas cards and exchange gifts once in a while, when we can afford it (because we’re poorer now than we were at 16). We ask about each other’s partners and siblings and pets. We’ve watched live streams of one another’s commencement ceremonies to witness college and high school graduations across hundreds of miles. We FaceTime to catch up. All despite, in most cases, having never met each other in the real world.

Lately, we talk earnestly about how the first time many of us will meet will be at each other’s weddings, and how those milestone events in our lives will share dual meanings. Fortunately, many of us share mutual internet friends, and so we can come together all at once to share our joy.

Something I love most about our bonds is our commitment to supporting one another. When at one time that meant hoping we’d win radio contests for concert tickets, it now means wishing each other luck on the big job interview, or contributing what little money we have to each other’s projects. When I edited a book in college, for example, many of the book’s first sales came from outside the Midwest because my friends were sweet enough to order it. If I had ever doubted our commitment to one another, that gesture alone was a ringing endorsement of our love.

This is all to say that, although my internet habits have concerned my family since I was a preteen, the friendships I have made have been invaluable and genuine and beautiful. Had I been born five or ten years earlier, I would not know the people I talk to every day and share my grossest habits with. As a teenager, I felt ashamed of first, my obsession with this boyband—because what do we love more than to make young girls feel bad about the things they like!—and second, the fact that I had an easier time making friends online than I did in the real world. But these are people who, given the opportunity to meet organically, would have still become my best friends. And I am so grateful to have had access to that community when I needed it most, and for it to have lasted in such a meaningful way into my adulthood.

Twitter has even been a vehicle of establishing friendships with people who I could conceivably bump into IRL. By connecting with the few people I cared to keep in touch with after high school, I was exposed to the friends they made in college, and now my network of funny, brilliant, interesting, talented people was a little bigger. We live in different areas of the state and have even maybe been in the same place at the same time at some point, but we’ve never met in person. Still, we can post stupid stuff about our shared and differing interests and enjoy one another’s friendship in a simultaneously distant and local way.

I’ve never been great at making and keeping friends IRL, so this is a real treat for me.

In my (faulty) memory’s chronological order, Ashlyn, Drino, Micah, Amy, Hanna, Andrea, Synella, Karina, Mikaylee, Rana, Nina, Irini, Tabitha, Janella, Lily, Maddie, Miranda, Rania, Trisha, Sarah, Irene, Mackenzie, Leslie, Ali, Grace, Tori, Clayton, Eli, Tia, Meghan, Matt : thank you for being in my life.

I love you, and I am so happy we have stuck around to be with one another. Cheers to the next many, many years.

Lexie

This is a Post about All my Friends I’ve Never Met, Part 1

I was born in the mid-nineties, which means I grew up with the internet in a different way than my sister—who’s ten years older than me—and my younger brother and sister—ten and eleven years younger than me, respectively.

I remember dial-up, though it was only a short time before we upgraded to high-speed internet. I remember when websites still looked like they were built in Microsoft Paint, and Ask Jeeves, and Space Cadet 3D Pinball.

My big sister and I, both saddled with crushing introversion, gravitated toward computers in our own ways. I remember her blogging on LiveJournal and contributing to forums and talking about her internet friends (people who would remain her closest friends into adulthood), and in the early aughts this was all very foreign to a small town Midwestern family like ours. It seemed weird. My family worried that my sister was talking to predators and perverts online that stigma made its way into my head too.

It wasn’t until my sister had moved out and was in college that I was left to my own devices with the internet and my introversion. Mostly I spent my time downloading music and a plethora of viruses off LimeWire and changing my status on MSN Messenger to All Time Low lyrics. Then my cousin— my closest friend growing up—told me about Second Life.

Although it’s lost much of its notoriety in the last five to eight years, at that time, Second Life was fairly new and surrounded with a fair amount of stigma. For those who aren’t familiar, it was—is?—an MMO (massively-multiplayer online) game where users could create a “second life” for themselves. Second Life was stigmatized because people saw it as a bunch of antisocial nerds pantomiming a fabulous online “life” while they did nothing interesting or fabulous IRL (in real life). Also, it was likely a hotspot for predators and perverts in the early days.

It’d be impossible to summarize the breadth of communities Second Life became host to. There were sex resorts and night clubs and farms and shopping malls and schools and hospitals and full-blown communities, all online and built by people who played the game. Calling it a “game” even feels misleading because there was really no end point and no set purpose. You were free to do anything you could dream up, whether that meant animating sex with strangers or building houses.

One of the most interesting facets of Second Life, which my cousin was heavily involved in, was adoption. Adoption agencies on Second Life were a dime a dozen. The idea was that you could make your avatar look and even talk like a child—talking, in SL, was just typing into either a public chat visible to anyone nearby or a private message or using your microphone if you were really comfortable—and could be matched with an adult or adults who wanted to play your parent.

These adoption agencies were usually huge buildings with tiles all over the walls. Kids or parents could pay to get their picture and profile up on one of those tiles, and then if someone was interested, they could fill out an application. If a match was made, their respective tiles became inactive.

I know this sounds bizarre. And from the outside, I suppose it is. But this is where I think it gets kind of beautiful.

Many times, the people on Second Life who wanted to adopt a child were people who could not have children IRL. And although having a virtual child controlled by another adult somewhere across the world is absolutely nothing like having a real child, it created a space for storytelling where you could enjoy the fun of family life with a thoughtful, creative participant on both sides. This storytelling, or roleplaying, function was what appealed most to my cousin, and later to me.

One of the main draws to adoption, for me at least, was that I was way too young to be playing and did not have any money to make the game more fun and shiny. Generally “adoptive parents” showered their new child in gifts and clothes like any parent would. It was tricky to achieve, though, because when you enter SL for the first time, you looked like a “noob,” by which I mean your avatar is wearing a free outfit and free hair and free skin that thousands of other new players are also wearing. You are instantly recognizable as new, and so the sooner you can scrounge up some new digs, the better.

I mentioned that people built houses in SL, which is just one example of the artistry on the platform. Sure, I could have built a house, but I had no experience with applying textures or making animations work. Other folks could build houses that looked nearly real, with functional doors and windows and appliances that your avatar could interact with.

Similarly, people more talented than I made clothes and skins and hair that could be purchased to make your avatar less ugly and more real-looking. Well-made clothes and hair moved like real clothes and hair when your avatar walked, and well-made skins wore makeup and had the appearance of real skin. People even made shapes that could make your avatar look—even walk—like a supermodel, or a child, or an old man.

Some people made a living—yes, in real life—with the things they made and sold in SL. That always baffled me, but seeing the kind of real money people spent in the game, it made sense. (Although I will say that the exchange rate from USD to Lindens was advantageous).

Anyway, looking like a noob made it hard to get adopted, because you effectively looked like a gold-digger. And, let’s face it, I was. But there were ways around that, if you found the right match.

A huge part of Second Life was devoted to roleplaying in more variations than I can fathom. There were family units that lived in communities and attended schools and churches that enjoyed playing the roles of members of a family. There were fantasy communities where people played wizards and witches and elves. And there were communities built as cities where you could get up to any number of roleplaying scenarios if you found the right companions.

When the adoption route didn’t work out for me—I was probably 12 IRL, and the last thing I wanted to do was play a child—I found myself searching out roleplaying communities of a different kind.

Like in Dungeons and Dragons or The Sims, SL lent itself to the creation of any character you could imagine. Before I got heavily into roleplaying in my favored communities, my avatar was a child, then a teacher, then an elf. All I had to do was make a few tweaks to my appearance and, as was customary, update my roleplaying information in my profile. Many folks, myself included, had multiple characters they played with the same avatar, and had the details for each character on a separate tab on their profile so other people would know who they were roleplaying with.

For what felt like a long time I roleplayed as a sort of cyberpunk misfit in a community called Midian, which was a kind of post-apocalyptic city with prostitutes and criminals and all sorts of fun debauchery. I never really made close ties with anyone there, although I did roleplay from time to time with other community regulars, and so I moved on to a place set loosely in a post-Katrina Louisiana city called Hathian, better known as Crack Den.

Don’t laugh! Okay, you can laugh. It’s a ridiculous name.

In my early days in Crack Den, I decided to try my luck at playing a teenage boy, and it was kind of fun, especially because I was a girl IRL and thus way more sensitive and sweet than real boys. The ladies loved me—my character even briefly had a girlfriend! There are songs I loved at that point in my life that I now associate with Crack Den because they were songs my character could feasibly enjoy with other people his age.

At some point Crack Den fell off the face of the platform and was getting remodeled. This wasn’t uncommon for communities in SL, because maintenance made it possible to host more avatars and show off cooler stuff that people had made. At that time I created a new character, more or less an amalgamation of all the teenager girls I’d played before, and returned to Midian. It was a bust. Almost everyone had left. So I tried what was supposed to be the newer, better Midian, Perdition. It was even wilder than my previous haunt, in such a way that I never clicked with anyone else there and left after only a few tries.

At this point maybe it’s helpful to describe what I mean by “trying” to roleplay with strangers. It went something like this: people would plant their avatars somewhere on the server and wait to proposition or be propositioned by someone else nearby. For example, if I was in a park and saw someone else in the park, I might throw out a chat about how my character had noticed them and maybe said hello. If the other person was interested—or even at their computer—they would send out a chat describing how their character responded to mine.

A lot of the time, you’d get no response at all. Sometimes this meant the other person wasn’t interested, and other times it meant they were simply AFK (away from keyboard). In the latter scenario, they might come back to find your chat and shoot you a private message to see if you were still interested in doing a scene, at which point you might make your way back to the park or wherever they were. Evidently, nobody was picking up what I was putting down in these communities.

I got so bored I stopped playing SL entirely, probably to the relief of my parents. I know I spent a lot of time on the computer, being secretive and staying up way too late talking to strangers. I guess they were right to worry. My cousin’s parents were uncomfortable with her playing, too, but she continued and had a lot of fun in the world of family roleplaying. We never roleplayed together much until the very end of my tenure on SL, but any time I went to hang out with her IRL and watched her play, I got the itch to return to the game.

So of course I did, and by the time I got back, Crack Den was back up and totally different. It was regaining the healthy population it had once had at its height, but with decidedly new clientele. What had once been a haven for teenage avatars now became home to more young adult characters. My teenage boy character seemed out of place there, and my prior roleplaying partners had moved on anyway.

Eventually I settled on a teenager named Ro, short for Ronan. Because I had never been adopted, I created a story about how Ro’s parents were wealthy and distant and how she had branched off independently and was now on her own. If I needed to, I could include my fictional parents in my roleplaying, but everyone else knew it was just storytelling. If I had had parents, their avatars may have participated in roleplaying scenes with me.

It wasn’t long after I created my new character that I met the people who would become my nearest and dearest friends in SL. First I met Ashlyn, a teenage character with a story similar to mine. We got along IC (in character) and OOC (out of character). Eventually, I would learn why.

Next I met a character whose obscure name I can’t even remember now (while editing this I remembered his name—Drino!), besides the letter D, but who became Ro’s boyfriend. He was mostly mute, emotionally damaged from years of abuse (according to his character’s story), and prone to violence. Together we were really compatible storytellers, and our characters weaved a love story full of patience and gentleness despite their troubled pasts. Again, we got along great IC and OOC, and eventually D recruited his friend Micah to join us in Crack Den. With a group of four who regularly roleplayed together, had finally found my community. Additionally, the post-Katrina setting lent itself to storytelling; the ramshackle buildings and homes had built-in history we could work with and the overall strife of the sim made sense in that context. Our characters were by and large people who were stuck there, still in disaster recovery.

I think what was so wonderful about roleplaying was that, when it was well done, everyone’s character had a whole story that you may know about IRL but had to eke out naturally as your character. You could engage in arguments or physical fights, but you had to honor the other character’s boundaries and limitations. If you didn’t, you were called out for “godmodding” and shamed into the abyss. It was a conscious exercise in consent.

For example, I once roleplayed a scene with a stranger who decided to attack my character. When her character cornered mine in an alley, my character could have pulled out her cell phone and called 911. But she didn’t, and so she basically got her ass kicked. Genuinely out of nowhere, Micah stumbled upon our scene and messaged me privately to ask if he could join. I messaged the woman whose character was kicking my character’s ass to check, and she said, “Sure!” And then Micah’s character described seeing Ro getting her ass kicked and came to help.

Eventually I became close and comfortable enough with Micah and Ashlyn and D that I wanted to reveal to them that I was underage. This was a pretty big deal in SL, because adults didn’t like kids junking up the servers, and getting caught could mean getting banned. Most kids were easy to spot because they spammed chats and left boxes and unfinished projects all over servers, but I felt confident that I’d conducted myself maturely and felt bad about lying to them. I started with Ashlyn.

If you’ve seen the movie Almost Famous, you probably remember the scene where Penny Lane and William are backstage at the Stillwater show and go back and forth asking one another, “How old are you really?” My conversation with Ashlyn was something like that. We went back and forth, pretending to be 17, and then 16, and then 15, and finally revealing our real ages. She was probably 14 or 15 and I was 13 or 14. Even through my screen the feeling of relief was palpable. We trusted one another and now that we knew each other’s secret, our bond was cemented and we could complain about school and our parents.

Next I told D. I think ultimately I still said I was older than I really was, and he seemed surprised. He thanked me for telling him the truth, and that was the whole thing. Business went on as usual. I was less close with Micah, so I didn’t tell him, but I assumed D had told him anyway.

We continued to roleplay together, and my cousin even joined us with a new character who was written into the story as Ro’s big sister. While we all roleplayed together, we chatted OOC in private messages and shared links to songs, anecdotes about IRL stuff, and plans for the scene we were in or ones that we may play out another day. Knowing I was underage made D more protective of me and, by extension, Ro, and I could sense him losing interest and becoming uncomfortable with playing her boyfriend. Eventually, after days and weeks of badgering him to roleplay a scene with me, he messaged me and said something like, “You’re like my little sister. I’m sorry.” And while I understood that, our storytelling chemistry had been such a treat to take part in, his distance was a huge blow. Honestly, I probably had a crush on him, too.

At around the time I stopped playing, so did a lot of others. We lost interest, or life got busy, and devoting time to playing with strangers on the internet eventually had less and less importance. I’m glad I stopped playing when I did, because I was borderline obsessed and let it take up too much of my time at an especially impressionable age, but I still often think about the people I met and what they may be doing now. I wish we had been just a little closer so I could send them a Facebook message and say, “Hey, remember me? I was just thinking of you and I hope you’re doing well. Also, I’m a grown-up now.” Ashlyn’s avatar even used her real full name, and I remember peeking at her Facebook page to verify she really was a real-life teenage girl; now, I can’t find her. We did spend a great deal of time together, in our virtual way, and that years-long exercise in storytelling was priceless to me. I’m just surprised it took me so long to realize how invaluable it was.

I didn’t intend for this post to be so long, but the more I got into it, the more I realized how much I’d have to explain myself for having played this MMORPG for years as a preteen. I probably shouldn’t have, but I did, and I’m grateful for it. I miss the company of the people I got to know, and at times I feel desperate just to check up on them, even if they wouldn’t remember me. If this story seems to come from left field, well, now you know. I am an even bigger dork than you may have anticipated.

Lexie

P.S. Part two of this post will go live on Wednesday.