I have thrown out my entire adolescence. It was mostly craft supplies. I am cleaning out my old bedroom, and also thinking about traveling and recipes and gardens. 

I came home to find that everyone in my family had, to varying degrees of personal commitment, given up grains and sugars. For my brother, this has been a several-year-long lifestyle choice. For my parents, it's a weight-loss thing. I've been going along with it because it turns out I will try just about anything if I can treat it as some sort of experiment. I don't actually miss sugar very much - after about two weeks without it, I visited my grandma and ate a few squares of Cadbury milk chocolate, and I was surprised by how sweet it tasted. Sugar is sweet.

A few days ago, though, I had half a piece of chocolate pie and it was actually pretty delicious, and also I felt kind of rebellious. Which means, it looks as though you can make me weirder than I already am, and that is by removing sugar from my diet and thereby effectively turning pie into my own personal equivalent of, like, drugs.

The one excellent part about this is that suddenly I can wake up in the mornings like it ain't no thang. It is so weird - when I go to work I get up at 6 am, and I am cheerful about it. I don't have to be at work until 9:30, and it only takes me half an hour to get there, but I like to give myself time in the mornings to, you know, ease into being alive. Normally, I would have a difficult time resisting the possibility of more sleep, but suddenly, I rise with the sun and I kind of love it. I make breakfast and coffee, and I read until it's time to go, at which point I am sufficiently accustomed to existing in the world and life is good. 

I do, however, really miss sandwiches. 

But, I think about recipes. I've been reading them for fun. (My love for food blogs has always been disproportionate to the amount I cook.) Neither of my parents are really into cooking - I mean, they do it, but for them it's always been a very utilitarian thing. But cooking makes me happy. (Well, baking makes me happy, really.) The thing is, nothing I am good at making can actually be eaten by anyone in my family anymore, so I have been looking for new recipes. Mostly, I have been looking for Things that Resemble Grains but Aren't. My most recent obsession is baking crackers made with almond flour. They are delicious, and I've made a batch almost every day for the past week. 

I know that library school doesn't miss me, and I don't miss it, either. The thought of never going back has crossed my mind more than once. I know I couldn't leave it unfinished, but in my least brave moments I don't want to return. I wish I were kidding. The realization snuck up like a bad storm, but once I said the words out loud I knew I meant them. I hope it's just post-first-year shock, and I hope I feel differently by August, but right now it's all stomach churning dread. I feel entirely lost, and I hate myself for it. So I read recipes, and I think about going to Paris, and I throw out everything in my bedroom and hope that in four months I am less messy.  

Tomorrow my mom and I will buy plants for the garden. My mom has been talking about planting lilac bushes, and I am thrilled about this. They are my favourite. Also, poppies. But I would like to know what the thing is with petunias. I feel like every single person in this town plants petunias, and they're perfectly nice flowers but they are not the only flowers in the world so why? Is it a small town thing? A senior citizen thing? Does everybody do this, and is there some secret about the seemingly universal appeal of petunias that I am unaware of? 

Really, I would like to know. 

h. 

I haven't been writing here because I have been writing elsewhere. 

I have, in short, started a project in which I write about one thing I'm grateful for each day. It's sort of a personal challenge. I wanted to discipline myself to write daily, and I wanted to see if I could share what I wrote with people in my life (which has always been an idea that has terrified me), and I wanted to see what would happen if I spent every day searching, deliberately, for the good in things. In everything. 

It started because I was searching for something to do for Lent. Until now, I'd only ever observed Lent halfheartedly, if at all - I'd never understood this part of the year well enough for it to mean a whole lot to me. This year, though, my understanding has changed. I wanted to do something to observe the season, but had no idea what. And, the night before Lent was to begin, the idea for this blog just sort of... fell into my brain. 

I told myself from the outset that I would share it with other people - an experiment, I thought, to see if I could. But it took me a long time to work up the nerve. When I finally did send it to a few friends, the rest of the work happened for me. My friends sent it to other friends, who sent it to their friends, and suddenly there was this little network of people reading my words each day. It's been... nice.

Surprisingly nice. I have always felt like sharing my writing - my thoughts - with other people somehow meant asking a lot of them. I felt like it might impose an expectation of something - consideration, or attention, or praise, or criticism - that they probably didn't want to give. Partly, I never wanted to force a response from others, and partly I was afraid that if I did, I wouldn't be able to handle the response I got. I was afraid nobody would like it. 

But the people who read it have also gone out of their way to tell me so. My cousins and aunts and friends from home send me e-mails about it. I got a card about it in the mail. My housemates discuss it at the dinner table. (That part is still a little hard for me to stomach, but the fact that people not only read, but remember, and relate to, the things I've had to say, that they talk about specifics, is kind of amazing to me.) It isn't politeness, or courtesy - it's genuine interest. 

And, yes, these are all people who know me personally and so they are more inclined to be kind than the general public. But, still. They have been so very kind. 

And maybe it's weird that this is such a surprise to me, but it is. All along I have been so wrapped up in fearing rejection that the opposite really - really - never occurred to me. I have never thought about the ways in which what I say might actually reach other people, even in small ways. I've been too shy to let myself understand how very cool that could be. How cool it is. 

I've always enjoyed - more than enjoyed - the writing itself. That I also enjoy the fact that it's being read is a very new thing, indeed. 

Having said that. You are welcome to read it too, if you would like. 
 

h.

I am supposed to be working on a paper about the information seeking habits of adult hobbyists. Specifically, I am writing about the information seeking habits of adults who study butterflies for fun. Because, butterflies. I had to. Old ladies with grey buns and tiny glasses perched on the tips of their noses, sketching wings in the margins of their notebooks while listening to a lecture on the migration patterns of lepidoptera, eating cookies during the break and saying, "Oh, yes, last summer I added milkweed to my garden and you should have seen how the monarchs came." How can you resist that sort of thing? 

I know these things about butterfly meetings because I went to one, for research purposes. I was a butterfly interloper. My heart nearly burst from the loveliness of so many people glowing with joy while words like Mourning Cloak and Red Admiral hatched from their mouths like fresh wings. 

But I can't focus on the paper, because I am one butterfly away from becoming a lepidopterist myself. I keep google image searching different species, because the Striped Blue Crow has wings the same pattern as the night sky and I can't stop looking, there are so many things in this world that I want to love. 
 

h. 

Thank you for your comments on my post from a few days ago. This is all really new stuff for me to think about, and I when I saw that you had taken the time to think about it, too, it made me really happy. I don't even know if it's possible to define how a person learns, but trying to understand it has made a strangely enormous difference in the way I approach so many different things. Thanks for reading my thoughts about it. 

Also. The poem. Writing it was an awfully strange experience. I woke up that morning with an idea, and kept telling myself that I didn't have time to think about it now, I would try to write it later. I had a paper due the next day that needed my attention. But when I sat down to work on the paper, I found myself writing the poem out instead. I worked on it for longer than I should have, but it was the nicest way to spend a morning. (And in the end, it was much different than the thing I started out with, which is how it alway seems to go.) I haven't done anything like that in a really long time, and feel like I have no sense of its, you know, quality. But it was so so good to work on it, to write something for fun, something that was just mine, something I didn't expect. 

And now it's 2 a.m., and I swear I had other things to say, but I don't remember anymore.

h. 

It's very much a work in progress, but there it is. 

h. 

My morning involved calling an ambulance for a 70 year old woman. I was working at the parish reception desk, and was about to leave and go to mass when she appeared before me, pale and staggering and telling me she didn't feel well and could I please not leave her all alone she's scared. I was scared, too. It was not an emergency in the somebody-is-having-a-heart-attack-right-now sense, but she was disoriented and couldn't answer the questions I asked her and looked both terrified and in pain, although she struggled to tell me why or how. After some worrying and some consulting actual grown ups on my part (all of whom were equally unsure of what to do - since when did we become so hesitant to take care of one another, myself included?), she left in the arms of paramedics. Which are far better arms than mine. It seemed like she was going to be okay, and I hope that's true.

It has been a strange week full of the sorts of discoveries I have no idea how to write about on the internet. The easy (ish) bit to explain is that I'm learning about how I learn, about how I understand things. This feels like a big deal, mostly because I've never actually thought about it before. I assumed there was only one proper way to do it: you start at the beginning of something and build upon your knowledge until you get to the end. It all happens in sequence, and there are concrete things to be grasped along the way. This is how they teach you in school. It never occurred to me that there were other ways to do it, that not everyone's brain operated like this. 

(This is going to be long, and possibly abstract - consider yourself warned.) 

Generally, my understanding of things is a lot more... mysterious. For whatever it's worth, my life is full of objective proof that my brain works quite well. I've always been an A student. I am in graduate school. These are not things that happen to people who are not on some level intelligent. But I've always felt kind of stupid, and while you could argue that confidence has something to do with that (and you wouldn't be wrong), it has also had a lot to do with the fact that learning, for me, has always felt overwhelmingly unpredictable and, though this will sound strange - scary.

What happens, for me, is the exact opposite of the concrete, linear style that I always thought was The Way: I usually know the end point first. More often than not, I start with the answer, or at least I reach the answer much more quickly than most people. I have intuition that borders on freaky. (In the Myers-Briggs test, if you're familiar with that, I am an INFJ.) It's taken me a long time to identify and trust this, but it's the truth - even when I have very little understanding of a subject, I often draw conclusions that are correct. This is why I am able to pull papers out of thin air the night before they're due and without having done any of the reading, and why those papers usually receive high grades. I "get" things.

But I don't learn them. I can almost never tell you how I have reached a particular conclusion, or a particular understanding. I can't trace my train of thought, or identify the steps that led me to an answer... because there are no steps. I just "know" things sometimes - a lot of the time - and although I am learning that I can rely on that ability, it is also incredibly frustrating and sometimes scary. 

(I mentioned the Myers-Briggs test earlier only because, for me, it's evidence that this is actually a thing - that other people's brains work this way, too. I know it sounds a little weird, but I am not the only one.) 

It makes me feel scattered. Internally, my world sort of oscillates between searing clarity and utter chaos: I am either completely certain about something, or concepts and observations float around, rearranging themselves into combinations I can't follow. It's a lot to filter through, and it has made school a challenge - for years I have tried to force myself to follow this sequential pattern of learning that seems, from the outside, to be perfectly reasonable. But it has never worked for me, and so a lot of the time, when I study, I content myself with simply "putting in the time," because I feel that I am supposed to, without that time ever being terribly productive. (There are probably ways for it to be productive, though I am only just beginning to figure out what they are.)

If I've ever seemed to grasp a concept well, it's because I have memorized it rather than because it makes actual sense to me. (In elementary school, this is how I did everything. I wrote out my notes - word for word - over and over and over until I could basically recite them.)

Though, there are subjects for which this has never worked - anything science related. I am good with theory, but horrible with anything practical. Facts and figures don't stay in my head. If they do, I lose myself in them - in the details - in the hopes that they will help me understand the bigger picture (but they never do). 

In university, I found that showing up to lectures was my best strategy. I didn't have to take notes (I took fewer and fewer notes every year). Simply paying attention was usually enough to give me what I needed to do the work. My grades have always reflected a solid understanding, whether or not I have ever felt like I've actually had one.

But for all my talk of how learning has always been frustrating, I like it. I wouldn't have stayed in school for this long if I didn't. It's an overwhelming process, but I am hungry for knowledge, for ideas, all the time. It's just that I have never made the effort to understand my own, particular system - I have never known that I could. 

It's like... a tree. I get the leaves first. And then, slowly, I build the branches... but never all at once or in order, from one side of the tree to the other. They appear here and there at random, until every group of leaves is connected to something. This part is slow, but exhaustive - every leaf is accounted for. And then eventually I get the trunk. The trunk is less a literal beginning point or base - I am not actually learning backwards - and more of a metaphorical thoroughness, a sense that whatever it is that I've understood is grounded in something solid. 

But this thorough and backwards way of learning takes a long time, and I am not always that patient. So I've learned to rely on my instincts, because I can, even though it isn't always what's actually best. When I am particularly frustrated, I avoid the "learning" altogether, because the need to be thorough combined with the weird mystery of knowing and not-knowing overwhelms me. 

Now that I am aware of this, I'm working on finding a system that works. For now, the tree analogy helps a lot. I find that illustrating things with maps or charts is really helpful, too, because it gives me the freedom to jump around a bit more, to map out big ideas without necessarily needing the details. I know that I am much better with theories and concepts than I am with specifics or concretes. The more abstract, the better. 

And I know this whole thing will probably only ever be interesting to me... but figuring it out has felt like a big deal. Even just admitting to the fact that half of the time I am full of knowledge I have no idea how I've obtained has erased some of the mystery from my daily life. 

For anyone who reads here (and who has read this far)... have you thought about how you learn? What works for you? 

h. 

I got sick, and then I got sicker. I spent most of this past week in bed. And then I made some choices. Yes, it has been a week of major life decisions made under the influence of a fever. Don't be alarmed.

I dropped a class. I'd been thinking about this since the middle of last term. I am in a graduate program, and had been (until last night) taking the maximum course load - which alone is an absurd amount of work, because that's what you sign up for when you go to grad school. On top of this, I have two big extracurricular commitments. And, in the midst of several (like, a small truckload of) panic attacks, I considered (a small truckload of times) finding a way to lessen the extracurricular load. In those moments, it seemed like the most acceptable course of action - because, I thought, I am in school and so my priority should be doing my schoolwork. Full stop.

But I couldn't drop the extras - not because it wasn't possible, but because I didn't want to. The things I do in my spare time are huge sources of joy, and they're also, in their own ways, important parts of how I want to spend my life. They may not be giving me a master's degree, but I learn as much from them as I do from my classes, and I feel like they are equally important in helping me to, you know, grow as a human. I couldn't imagine giving these things up in the interest of doing more schoolwork. It would have been too sad.

And I have been able to balance all of it, but it's been hard. A look at my schedule on any given day would show you that. It works, but barely. I've barely begun the term, and I've already managed to get sick enough to incapacitate myself for the better part of a week. I don't sleep, or can't because I am afraid of forgetting something. It doesn't matter how much you love the things you do when the sheer volume of them makes you feel like you'll collapse. This isn't how I want my life to be.

In my classes, I spent a lot of time worrying that I was scraping through at the expense of actually learning a whole lot. I wrote earlier this week that I was overcommitted, and I feared that my determination to do everything would come at the expense of doing any one thing well. I've proven that I'm capable of juggling this much, but at what cost? I'm in a program designed to prepare me for a career, and right now I am spitting out the work - because I know that I can - without ever really learning the material. My grades are high - I say I'm "scraping through," but I know that I am not objectively failing at anything. I am weirdly blessed with the ability to pull my assignments out of thin air at the last minute, and this has never not worked out for me, but it isn't a measure of what I actually know.

And I wrote that I thought I needed more discipline. I thought that if I just worked harder, maybe faster, it would be possible to create the time to rest. But that isn't true. The work will never stop. This isn't a bad thing - this is adulthood - but making work my entire life is not the answer. It's not the sort of thing where if you make it your entire life for long enough, you eventually do all the work there is to do and then it goes away. I'm not buying myself free time for the future by filling every moment of the two years that I'm here. All I'm doing is making myself tired. And sick. And possibly a little crazy.

So I've dropped a class. It isn't because my non-school life is too much, and it isn't because I can't work hard enough, and it isn't because my grades are suffering: I just want to slow down. I need to slow down. Choosing my life can't stop at filling it with things that matter to me - I must also learn how to do those things well, and with care.

This is, I think, the beginning of a different way of understanding how to spend my time. I am allowed to want to enjoy my life, and I am allowed to want to do things well, even if that means doing some of them slowly. I know I may not always have this kind of freedom, but I have it now, and I am going to use it.

This morning, for the first time in five months of grad school, I woke up without struggling against the weight of the tasks of the day. For me, this alone is worth having to take a class or two in summer school. The relief is enough to make me cry.

h.

It is Monday morning and I am in class and it is pouring rain in January. I am sick. There is some sort of awful cold-type thing making its way through our house and today it has settled into my chest. Glory hallelujah. I have an hour left of this lecture and I’m disturbing everyone by blowing my nose. Sorry.

It has been a hard few weeks. I am undeniably overcommitted and trying to make it all work, and I know I will find a way, because there’s always a way, but I’m afraid of doing too many things at the expense of doing any one of them well.

I am learning how my days must go, how in the midst of all the big undertakings there must still be time for the little things I love so much, no matter how overwhelmed I feel by certain tasks. I will not lose time for writing letters, for drawings, for reading, for walks. I am considering this term an exercise in discipline, in quiet joy.

Quiet joy because quiet is the only way I know how to do anything, not because its stillness makes it somehow less.    

h.

I woke up to snow and was secretly thrilled. I never thought I'd long for snow, but not having it has made me a strange sort of sad. Yesterday I traipsed around the city in the rain and would have given anything for some fat, white flakes instead. I feel a quiet glee when snow falls. It comes from suspecting that all the glittering front yards and driveways are not the product of science, but of some kind of sorcery - from feeling closer than ever to being let into the unnamable other world I am certain exists in tandem with my own. 

And then today everything was white. Snow. I watched it blow in clouds across the tops of buildings, opened my window and breathed it in as it gathered on the sill. 

Last year, when it snowed for the first time, I promised myself that I would spend every first snow of the year doing nothing but reading the Chronicles of Narnia and looking out the window, even if it meant I had to drop a million important things. I was only half joking when I said it. It felt like kind of a perfect personal tradition. Today I had neither the time nor the Narnia (I left most of my books at my parents' house), but wished that I had both.

But I spent the first part of the day reading the book I did have (Karen Connelly's Touch the Dragon, which regularly makes me cry) and counting snowflakes, and by next week I'll be complaining about the cold but for now it feels like magic.

h. 

And just like that, I'm back. From the aisle seat of the airplane, I stole glimpses out open windows and watched familiar brown fields turn into clouds, and then into city lights blooming like a galaxy beneath me. I walked home from the subway station pulling my suitcase behind me and almost forgot the codes to the front door. I was sadder to leave than I expected, not because I would miss anything but because in folding and packing and flying and saying goodbye I felt, briefly, the ache of being in between. I have so thoroughly outgrown my life with my family, but I am still growing into my life here, and for a few moments this afternoon I felt like all I had was nowhere. 

But that isn't true. In the airport I watched planes roar in and wrote pages in a journal I have barely touched in weeks, and as I flew from there to here I spent three hours reading prose that made me want to cry and laugh and trade my whole life for pens and paper, and I made faces at the curly golden baby sitting one seat behind me, and I tried to find the right word to describe the sky as it began to blush pink, and wherever I am I will have this place within me, always. Everywhere. So it's okay. 

h.