Two days (and one more sad sunset) later and the chapter is finished. It was anticlimactic. I sent it off and then I emptied the dishwasher and made a salad, which I ate while sitting on the floor and talking to Anna as she cooked. I only have two more to write, and one of them is short. And then begins the editing. 

I will miss this project when it is over. I won’t miss it enough to want to do it again, but I will miss it, despite the large quantities of panic, and the increasing frustration now that we are in the final weeks. There are moments where being caught up in a writing project just seems so very right. Where the words come easily. Even if those words are “nonprobabilistic purposive sampling.” Today was like that, a day of enjoying language enough to forget about the outcome, of losing hours to the stringing together of ideas, following the leaps of them. 

I know xanga won’t be around much longer. I’ve long been so fickle about writing here, and I’m okay with the thought that my blog will be gone soon. But, despite so much absence, lately these little shouts into the internet are nice, and necessary. This is a strange time. I’m glad for whoever might still be reading here. I have loved this place so. 

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I am letting the sun set on an unfinished chapter, and I am discouraged. I have been working on this one for too long, and it isn’t hard – I am just tired, scattered, and worried. July is the month in which everything happens. This entire document needs to be finished in just over three weeks. I tell myself over and over that it will be fine, and it will be – I am on schedule, everything is going very smoothly, and there is no reason to panic. But I do panic. There is so much to remember, to think about, and what if what if. Increasingly I wake up ill, with a lurching stomach and a tight chest. I tell myself it is is not reasonable or helpful to be so worried – because it isn’t, and this will all get done – but my body doesn’t listen.  

I like this work. I’ve been saying it all along, and it is always true, but holy crap.

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There is something about academic work that makes me positively ache for creative escapes. It isn’t that I don’t find my thesis creative in its own way – it is, and I am invested in making it not just good, or smart, but also beautiful. But it is not the same – too stuffed into headings and subheadings and packaged in a different vocabulary, concerned with a different kind of precision. 

Anyway – this afternoon, on the downswing of a particularly volatile encounter with my own, crazy panic, I read “A History of Weather” by Billy Collins. It is online at Poetry Magazine. (I would post it here but that might be illegal. Is there a rule about reproducing these things? This is probably something I should know.) I am forever searching the world for things that match my inner landscape. Something about reading poems, in these moments, feels right, feels like a good answer to so many internal hills and valleys. Whatever sound is echoing from either place really ought to be something beautiful. 

Anyway, I think you should read it. It is very, very good.  

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Dinner tonight was halva and a dish of blueberries. I ate it while staring out the window. These days I have been wondering if you arrive at adulthood long before you know you’re there, if you don’t see that you’ve grown up until you look back at your trail of choices and realize that they’ve taken you to a place you feel no need to justify or defend. This week I had a hard conversation with my mom about my future. She cried. I was perhaps the most collected, the most articulate, I have ever been. I wonder if adulthood is hearing yourself stand your ground. 

I wonder if it is realizing that the people who love you have no idea who you are. How often is love like that? We hold so fast to memories that we refuse to see the person standing before us. When we miss a person, how much of what we miss is really them, and how much is just ideas? But I don’t know who my parents are, either, and although I can imagine the many ways I am breaking their hearts, I will never understand. They are mysteries, too, and their love is real even if it feels as though it’s directed at a person who doesn’t actually exist. 

Maybe adulthood is understanding that the spaces between us all are large and growing larger all the time. Maybe it is loving without wanting to close the gap. 

What a strange time this is. 

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My roommate, Anna, says she knows something is wrong when I am awake past 9 p.m.

Last night, she got home at 10:30 and found me standing at the kitchen counter eating leftovers, and she gave me a look of grave concern. Despite the fact that I was already eating, she offered me more food. “You are a mystery to me,” she said, “When I want to love you, I can either feed you or give you lots of hugs. The rest escapes me.” 

I appreciated so many things about this, I could have cried.

I feel very incomprehensible to most people, most of the time. There was something strangely comforting in having someone be up front about that. And, you know. The rest escapes me, too. 

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Yesterday, as I was leaning on the kitchen counter and eating roasted broccoli straight from the pan, I thought about how this is precisely the life that a much younger me used to dream of.

I spend every day writing, engaged in academic work that interests and excites me. I have just moved into a beautiful little apartment, with a balcony and a fire place, and a roommate who makes me laugh deeply, and often. I am within walking distance of all that I could possibly need – the Basilica, the grocery store, the library, and several coffee shops are all within a few blocks, and beyond them there are parks and valleys and rivers, wilting lilac bushes, tight peony buds, and dewey, purple roses. In the evenings I cook exactly what I want to eat, which these days is almost always roasted vegetables. (My roommate’s softspoken Polish boyfriend told me yesterday, after trying some, “You have the superior way of cooking broccoli,” and I could not disagree.)  

Occasionally, there are dinners out, with friends. I am developing an appreciation for ciders. Mostly, though, I spend my time alone, and I’m okay with that, usually. My life requires it just now, and I am most comfortable alone. I have a lot to think about. I am a lot to be. 

I cry often, and am overwhelmed frequently. Even a younger me knew that I would never outgrow that, and the current me doesn’t mind. These days I have the strangest feeling of being very nearly at the crest of something, just inches away from a downward rush. I will want to remember the view from here, tears and all. 

This is all, occasionally, terrifying. Sometimes there is nothing I can do to spin it into something nice. But it is nice, underneath, and I do know that even when it doesn’t feel that way. 

And in all of this, there is the knowledge that something else is waiting, that beyond the rush of frenzied writing and eventual defending – which, most days, feels like everything - is… more. There is the quiet knowledge that everything I used to want looks much different through the eyes of the person I am now, and that although everything I have is every bit as beautiful as I imagined, the me who is twenty-four, and not sixteen, has finally begun to recognize her own heart, and has found it to be quite different than she thought. 

Which is not a way of saying I do not love this life – I do love it, absolutely. But I have learned that I love other things, too, and more. Do you know love that is like relentless curiosity, like an incredible ache? My desire for God is a surprising, consuming thing. All I had to do was name it, and it has expanded out and out and out in all directions. I hardly know how to talk about it and yet it is what I am made of. What do you do when this is who you are? Where do you go? 

All of this over dinner in the evening, standing, talking, with grey clouds and the hum of traffic, Anna jokingly calling me the Queen of the Cabbage as she picks warm purple leaves off the tray, the almost painful richness of so much beauty and of so many layers of being alive. 

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Everything is green and sunny. I wake up early, so very early, and do most of my day’s writing well before noon. Writing past noon increases the probability of crying by about 50%. I am trying very hard to be brave, but this project is a challenge. I’ve just finished one of three months of solid writing. Before this, the longest it has taken me to complete a project from start to finish was a week. The drawn-out incompleteness of it all is unnerving, and the stakes are quite high, and I spend a lot of nights kept awake by the swell of a nervous, racing heart.

But I will learn. I knew, signing up for this, that it would be difficult, and I wanted the challenge. Is it weird that I like to do hard things? I do. This project is not easy and there is no escaping it until it’s over: it hangs over my head every moment of the day, and sometimes that is scary, and sometimes it is unpleasant, but in the midst of it and underneath the anxiety, there is a certain satisfaction in knowing that I am growing, that this is pushing me, that out of this will come not just a thesis but a better work ethic and, perhaps, increased bravery borne of simply having to face the same fears every day. In many ways, I feel like this is teaching me more about myself than it is about my chosen area of study (though it is teaching me plenty about that, too). 

And I get that this is a pretty privileged perspective. I am beyond lucky to even be able to do this – and to have the luxury of doing it as essentially a full time job, without having to wait tables to pay bills or anything like that. I can enjoy the challenges I choose because I don’t have any challenges I didn’t ask for. At least not right now. 

And even with the panic, all is very, very well: I like this work, I am living in a beautiful apartment, I have friends nearby, a church within walking distance, and plans to bake cookies this evening. In my grown-up kitchen. I will eat them while I write and write and write at my enormous desk, living a life that has somehow become exactly what I want it to be and telling myself, when the tears well up around 2 p.m., that it is good to be crying over as big a gift as this. 

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As is usually the case, I have been here about eight times in the past three weeks, starting posts and wandering away, frustrated, or distracted, or both. Most mornings, I wake up wanting to write. The sun spills in through the apartment’s enormous windows and I stand at my desk and look out at green treetops and I want to tell a story, to write myself into my life. But I can’t find a way to climb over the same obstacle I have been trying to hurdle during all these months of absence from this blog, which is that I no longer really know how to write about what I love, about what captures my imagination, in a way that makes me entirely comfortable. 

In the interest of being straightforward (and in an attempt to save myself a lot of awkward dancing around terms before giving up and walking away, again, as usual): I think about God all the time. It is the single thought from which every other thought branches out. This hasn’t always been the case, though it has been increasingly the case as I have written this blog over the past few years, and I have never really known what to do about it, or what to say. I could try to tell the story of how this came to be, and maybe eventually I will, but for now it doesn’t matter. This isn’t about explaining myself, but about trying to sort out what to do with myself now that I am here. And what to write.

I know there are plenty of ways to write about God without actually writing about God – this is how we ended up with such marvels as The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings. And maybe I will find that this is the way for me, too. But for now, I struggle with the difference between being subtle and being apologetic. This is a complicated, unpopular topic, yes, and it is also a topic that I find endlessly interesting, that stirs my imagination in beautiful ways, and keeps me engaged in the world and finding joy in all that it contains. And I am not sorry. And to detach my experience of the world from it’s endlessly mysterious source feels like a lie. 

(I don’t think C.S. Lewis was sorry, either, for the record. But what I mean is that I don’t know if I want to veil what I really mean, at least not all the time.) 

I have always been annoyingly aware of how I might be perceived. So I have always worried about writing about these things, fearing that I will sound like a televangelist or like I am trying to shove something down someone’s throat. That isn’t what I intend to do at all. I just genuinely think this is interesting, and it is indisputably what I want to explore, in what I write and, more than that, in what I do with my life. 

I have no idea what that will actually mean, in terms of what gets written here. I am basically an enormous mass of existential drama, but I like it that way. I have long been tired of answering questions that seemed to stop short of the point. What sort of a career do I want? I don’t know, what is the purpose of my existence? I actually, honestly cannot separate these things – for years, I tried to do so and it made me miserable. And although it wasn’t as logical or sequential as simply this, there was a whole lot of freedom in acknowledging that certain things that always seemed deeply consequential were things I actually didn’t care about, and to then accordingly stop giving a shit. 

The truth of me is that I am somehow hardwired for this – for building my life around questions belief and existence and meaning, and for wanting to face these head on. I no longer care if that’s weird. And I don’t care if it’s difficult (and it often is – rarely am I actually appropriately brave; I typically meet my life with tears). And I don’t even care about not having answers, so long as I know I am working on the questions that mean the most to me. 

For a while I wondered if this was a phase. But it all began nearly three years ago, and it only grows.

So, here we are. 

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I’m still alive. I’m just conflicted about existing on the internet. 

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