When I Was Thirty-One, I

I still remember the night before I turned nineteen.  I was lying on the top bunk of my dorm in the ITHAKA compound on Crete, and I felt like maybe someday I might be beautiful.

I was feeling a lot of other things, too.  Thinking about my nineteen-y-ness inevitably made me think about my incipient twenty-y-ness (twenty-ness?), and all I could focus on were the things I hadn't done yet.  I'd never been to a party with people my own age.  I hadn't sung a solo longer than one line.  I hadn't been kissed (let alone that other thing).  I'd never written a paper longer than five paragraphs, and less than a year from then, I'd be at Yale University.  College.  People did things in college, right?  They kissed people and wrote papers and went to parties.  Probably.

And because of my gap year, I'd be almost twenty years old when I got there.  I'd be even more behind.

Oh God.  I would never do anything.  I would live out my life as a spinster-hermit dwelling in my parents' basement because I'd recently flunked out of Yale to the shame of everyone I'd ever met and I wouldn't even leave for fresh air, I'd just grovel in the dark and eat raw spaghetti out of a box and eventually die of scurvy and I'd never do anything.

I was well into a fit of total hopelessness when some shred of self-preservation grabbed onto my brain and said, YOU'VE DONE THINGS THIS YEAR.  WRITE THEM DOWN.  And thank the Lord for that faint piece of sanity, because when I started listing the things I'd done, I found that there were a lot of them.  I'd graduated from high school (I'm still not sure how).   I gave the graduation speech.  I read Haroun and the Sea of Stories and the fourth Harry Potter and I got into Yale and I learned a lot of Greek and I stood on the top of a dusty green hill on Crete as the sea and the sky glittered blue around me and a farmer taught us how to skin a pig that had just been slaughtered.

Ever since, on the eve of my birthday, I've written down a list of what I've done that year.  I include the big things, but also the small:  the books I've read, the movies I've watched.  The friends I've gained.

I don't keep these lists.  I have no idea where any of them are.  They're scribbled onto pieces of paper in various legal pads and notebooks, on the backs of unused student handouts from teaching and class syllabi from college.  I don't write them so that I can reread them later.  I write them to remind myself both that I'm doing things and that I need to keep doing things.

This will likely be boring to anyone who isn't me, so feel free to tune out.  It'll also be a little more emotionally honest than I'm generally comfortable with being online.  But now that I have a blog, I felt that this would be the perfect place for this year's list.

When I was thirty-one, I took a job in China.  I gave the graduation speech.  I sang the national anthem at a school assembly.  I pulled an all-nighter with ten other teachers and an alarming number of teenagers.  I co-taught an after-school credit retrieval course and co-ran an after-school tutoring program.  I shipped my cat across the country and oh, do I ever miss that wretched animal.  I said goodbye to being department head and left it in the incredibly capable hands of a friend.  I left my first high school, and it was one of the hardest things I've ever done.  I joined a new one, and it was one of the easiest professional transitions I've ever had. 

I read The Invisible Bridge and China in Ten Words and Code Name:  Verity.  I listened to the Decemberists and Janelle Monáe until I wanted to throw them all out of the window, and then I listened to them again.  I saw Orange is the New Black and the second season of Treme and more episodes of Bones than I would care to admit.

When I was thirty-one, I got serious about therapy.  I worked hard at the way I think about myself, and the way I still at thirty-one think that maybe someday I'll be beautiful.  I want to smack myself in the face every time I think that, because every time I do, a girl is watching, because every time I do I think of one of my students offering me a cinnamon roll and freaking out when I told her I couldn't eat it because I was on a diet.  ("Don't let society win, Ms. Crawford!," she shrieked.  "You're beautiful just the way you are!")  I try to remember that the things that I find beautiful about the world -- a red coat on a rainy day, the way the light slants over the Ohio trees near sunset, a nice wine with a nicer cheese -- do not fit into the narrowly-defined parameters of Vogue's cover models, and I don't have to, either.

I started a blog.

I stood on the Great Wall of China and dove under a waterfall in a rainforest in Puerto Rico and stared down at the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xi'an and kayaked through a dark, murky channel into a bioluminescent bay, the water sparkly with reflected stars and bioluminescence.  I put my hand down into the water, lifted my arm, and watched as the sparkles ran down my skin. 

When I was thirty-one, I started eating more vegetables.  (For real.  This is a big one.)  I also started eating breakfast again.  I got a second tattoo.  I graded approximately five thousand essays and started calling it "marking" sometimes instead of grading, except not always because why would my brain be consistent?  I started learning Chinese.  I started doing the dishes in a timely manner.  I learned how to live alone again.

I became part of a community and then I left it.  I think about dinners with Anthro!Girl and watching Treme with the Roommate and hot chocolate with Shari and shopping with Kyanne and dancing at the CatFarmer's wedding, and my chest constricts.  And then there's Puerto Rico with Cletus and the Harem, and the Grebster, and the Tiger and the Moorish Warrior and Captain Amazing, and I can barely breathe sometimes, I miss them all so hard.   But then also, I'm making new friends, with whom I can have adventures and sushi and cheese.  It's going to be okay.  I really think it's going to be okay.