Almost exactly one month ago, I graduated from my MFA program.
I walked across a stage lined with faces that I’d never seen before and will never see again. One of my professors, whom I hadn’t seen at all during my third and final year of the program, put the celebratory hood on me. I shook hands with the Chancellor, who makes about triple the salary that I have ever made, even in my highest paying position as an Associate Instructor at UC Davis. I walked down the stage across squeaky steps to a flurry of flashing cameras and instructions to pose for pictures that would cost too much for me to ever buy. The whole experience took about five to ten minutes. Much like losing my virginity years before, it was fast and disarming, and it left me questioning, That was it?
I’ve learned that most of the big, defining moments in life, the ones that we spend our short existence on this planet pining for and working towards, boil down to these anticlimactic moments. Graduations. Moving away from home. Getting your first job. Losing your virginity on a squeaky bed with a man who swears he doesn’t need to use lube then spends far too long trying to squeeze in between the folds of your body. All of these experiences boil down to the feeling of being warned of a hurricane and instead receiving a flash flood.
~~~
At this moment, I am twenty-seven. It is an age that I romanticized dying at when I was fourteen. Now, I keep thinking that I am only twenty-five or twenty-six. Over the last three years, I have written two manuscripts, both around about 170 pages. I keep reminding myself of this fact. In the flurry of job applications and finding a new apartment and figuring out where I want to spend the final half of my twenties, it already seems like my years in the MFA program were a dream. I’m already wondering what I have to show for it, what this path of artistry brings in terms of job prospects. I’m already feeling, as perhaps everyone does when they hit their late twenties, a bit behind. Like every second I have matters. Every choice I make is building for something else. Some greater, blurry moment in the future. Except that I don’t know what it is that I want to build. I’m holding the instruction manual, but I can’t read the language that it’s written in.
But I keep applying to state jobs and jobs with the school district and part-time retail jobs and every possible job I can think of. I keep looking for a cheap one bedroom apartment in the next town over, since I don’t want to be and can’t afford to be in this college town any more, and I can’t stomach going back home to my NorCal ghost town, to a house that falls apart around me. Most days, as I work my two part-time jobs and try to prove my worth through cover letters and CVs, I feel like a dog chasing a car. If I catch it, what will I do? I am trying to hold onto the sand of my life, but it is slipping through my fingers.
The truth is that I want to write. But I am scared. I’m scared of the slow revision process of my short story and essay collections. I’m scared to begin the search for publishers, something which my program has woefully prepared me for. I’m scared of rejection letters from agents and publishing houses, flying into my email box like letters from Hogwarts.
The truth is that the thing I’m most terrified of is change. I look around at this apartment, the 600 square feet of real estate that has belonged to me for almost a year now, and I know that I will have to leave it soon. I will have to find a new apartment. A new town. New people. Everyone I know is leaving Davis. Everything that I know is changing. I know that most people my age thrive on change. Some even welcome it. But after years spent traversing highway and county and state lines, I just want stability. I want to buy a house, and I want to grow roots. I want to plant a garden with my lover, which he will almost certainly wind up caring for because I could kill a cactus. I want to come home at night and watch TV on the couch with a tub of popcorn between us, cats and dogs on our laps. I want a paycheck that I can count on coming every two weeks. I want monotony. I also want to be an artist. These are contradicting desires, I know.
~~~
Today, I went for a walk, and as I watched the sun set into a soft pink hue, I listened to The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. This is my second time reading the novel. I read it when I was sixteen or seventeen, living in upstate New York, horribly depressed and anorexic. I remember sitting in the library that I wasn’t supposed to eat lunch in, but the librarian liked me, so she let me. I watched the snow fall in soft tufts out of the window, and I ate a graham cracker peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which my stepdad had gotten a surplus of from his new job as a Sergeant somehow. I ate one every lunch period because they were only 300 calories and they tasted good. I read The Thirteenth Tale, which I’d randomly plucked from the shelf that day, the snow painting the library a dull grey and the air smelling of peanut butter, and I wasn’t happy, but I was something close to it. Books and writing saved my life that year.
This year has been the year of re-reading old favorites. The Shadow of the Wind. The Hunger Games Series. The Percy Jackson Series. The Thirteenth Tale. All books that helped me through dark times in my life. Maybe I’m trying to find some piece of my old self in them. Maybe I am, to paraphrase what Georgia O'Keefe wrote about her own transitory summer, “waiting for myself to return.” Maybe these books hold parts of my adolescence trapped within their pages, and if I can just find out what about them comforted me at the time, I can also puzzle out what my life is when I’m no longer proving my worth through assignments and workshops.
In the chapter of The Thirteenth Tale that I was listening to on my sunset walk, Vida Winters says of writing, “When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.” The line arrested me, slowed my walk. That is what I have been doing all these years in the MFA program, I realized. Inventing selves. Inventing pasts. Doing and redoing things in my past, making them right. Maybe that is why the ghost of my past self haunts me so much now. She is lost without the confines of the program to contain her, make her into something.
Or maybe it is just the summer, and I don’t have a full-time job yet, and I have too much time to think.
~~~
July is a porous month. A month where the veil between past and present is thin. It has always been so to me. Things slip through the crack. Nostalgia reigns king. Some undefined longing for Julys past moves through me like a spirit. Time moves agonizingly slowly, then speeds up all of the sudden by the end of the month. I can’t seem to find my footing in this sinking ship of a month. July feels like a month for goodbyes. A month for letting go. I know that I cannot let go of the lessons that my MFA program taught me, and can never forget those formative writing years. I know that I cannot even let go of my identity as a student, not yet. Maybe in the winter. Maybe next month. Maybe next year. But not yet. It still has not sunk in yet.
But the truth is that as time continues its slow turn through this cruel month, I will continue to work on my revisions, both on myself and on my stories. The truth is that I will spend the rest of my life redefining myself and my relationship to myself and my past. The truth is that I will never find the elusive “me.” I can never fully fill the void left by trauma and absence, and my past self may continue to haunt me. But I can keep writing, moving closer and closer to who I am at the core of me. And I can keep revising.