Roadtrip Musings: On The Periphery
Back to the Bend...
I’m nestled into a comfortable and warm couch because of the generosity of an old college friend. She has allowed Cameron and I to crash while on our roadtrip from West to East. Up until this point, we’ve stopped at Super 8s and Holiday Inns, but for today, we’re fortunate enough to share in the comfort of a close friend. She lives in South Bend, Indiana, a stone’s throw from my alma mater (it feels weird to even use that term). It is both nostalgic and unsettling to be back here. My friend has spoke often about her own discomfort living in the apartment she inhabited during senior year sans the hoard of friends and laughter and classes that made it home. Here I am with her: wondering where I fit into this suddenly strange paradigm as an alumnus.
Today is an uncharacteristically warm day in South Bend and I decide to take advantage of the warmth and stroll around campus. I visit the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center where I spent ninety percent of my hours on campus. I visit Lafortune Student Center, the lobby of which I no longer recognize. I visit the Hesburgh Library which is bustling with faces largely unknown. I remember the steps I took to and from these places, yet don’t recognize the cracks that have formed in the concrete. They have come to separate me from it: the it being the mysterious, looming institution that is no longer mine. It is theirs: the students who rush to class, head bowed. I wonder if my status as alumnus, as former student is known, is tattooed on my forehead for all to see. I wonder if they know it has almost been a year. I wonder if they know how much it pains me to even admit it has almost been a year. I wonder if they know what is waiting for them on the other side of this well-manicured, well-kept green grass. I somehow convinced myself that the grass would be greener post-graduation, yet walking on the grass of this campus as an unemployed-magna-cum-laude-former-student feels shameful. Any second Julie Andrews playing the Queen of Genovia is going to scream at me to “get off the grass!”
The first face I recognize on this campus is my old therapist. Cameron and I are on our way to caramel-ribboned iced frappuccinos when I spot her walking out of Pure Barre, hands tucked in her coat pockets. I immediately avert my eyes because it feels wrong to say hello to someone who walked me through my worst moments only to now be walking out of Pure Barre, leading a life of beauty and brokenness all on her own: a life I know absolutely nothing about. Somehow it feels wrong to infiltrate her privacy and invite her into my present: worst moments mostly memories yet her grace and patience remembered all the same.
I wrote the following letter to myself after our time together:
Dear Kiera,
This will be a transformative and cathartic year for you. It is a year that will encounter many obstacles and unexpected challenges, yet will breed a more confident, more zealous you. You started the year unsure of how you might fit into the infancy of the Gateway paradigm. Almost immediately, however, you met seven people that would undoubtedly change your course in life. They allowed you to be yourself and even more, celebrated you for it. This ardor must not go unnoticed, and they are accredited with a better version of Kiera.
Your first semester will be blindingly euphoric. You will feel an acute sense of belonging and normalcy that before then you had never quite grasped. During those fateful four months, you will be welcomed for all of your idiosyncrasies, and become an incredible friend to others and to yourself. You will no longer wonder about how much little space you can comprise, but instead wonder about the space you inhabit, hoping that space is filled with love and sympathy for others. The friendship with yourself will blister and burn in certain times, yet ultimately gentle prodding will converge to an unprecedented amount of mercy for past battles and demons. For one of the first times in your life, you will glimpse complete and blissful happiness. A happiness that forces a more confident you, one that charts a new path of discernment. You will learn what it means to learn, to deeply engross yourself in various facets of knowledge and experience. This achievement will encourage a tenacity once unclaimed, and spur a healing that will rescue you from deep chasms left untouched.
Your second semester will be a test in the face of panic, one felt personally for many months, and then reverberated into a world suffering. You will learn the power of companionship and revelation, as you slowly start to collect the broken shards of your identity that were hidden inside yourself. A lot of this self-discovery will come in the form of various courses including your first FTT course at Notre Dame and a reclaiming of your faith through Theology at Holy Cross. However, a lot of this self-discovery comes in the form of new relationships - ones that provoke a broader understanding of self. These relationships will be formed both at Notre Dame and Holy Cross, and will help you navigate the dual-identity of which you inhabit. You will readjust your goal-setting narrative, untangling your warped sense of self-discipline. You will redefine your version of success and ambition. You will unwind the roots of your self-concept, hoping to discover the why of yourself. You will realize that God reveals the human person unto herself, and this undoing results from unmitigated lack of control.
Welcome to Notre Dame.
Your friend,
Kiera
This will be a transformative and cathartic year for you. (Almost) one year since graduation: do any of us know where we are or where we are going? I still don’t. I still feel like Anne Hathaway pre-makeover who is yelled at for stepping on grass by her at-the-time-unknown-grandmother-queen-of-genovia. Never is this more apparent when you are visiting your alma mater during a non-football weekend. You exist only on the periphery, where the grass is dead and weeds grow in the concrete. You feel irrelevant. You put everything into your four years yet there is nothing left for you besides the memories fading like paint chipping on walls and the eventual reality - which I desperately want to postpone - that soon you will not be the most recently-graduated graduate. This fact feels humiliating when you are unemployed and have moved back home. In less than 100 days now, other graduates will throw their caps and enter into the messiness of adulthood that I wish I could warn them about. Once they throw their caps and move their tassels, somehow that means that I can never throw mine again. I try to cross my ankles in the way that Julie Andrews wants me to, yet somehow I keep messing up.
I can’t be a princess, Julie, because right now I’m just a washed-up twenty-three year old who is trying to build her own tiara with toothpicks and stickers.
All in all, it was such a privilege to be warm and comfortable in my best friend’s apartment. We spend time looking at the polaroids that decorate her kitchen wall and memorialize our senior year. We spend time rehearsing old memories that feel both like yesterday and millions of years away. We spend time together, glad to have found each other in the not-much-greener-grass of early adulthood. We, most importantly, spend time practicing hope. We light candles and sing happy birthday and wish each other well when I leave the next morning for the final stretch of roadtrip. We hug goodbye, unsure when we will see each other next, yet knowing that the next will be whatever the next needs to be: messy, manicured, or maybe a little greener than the grass we stand on now.
me - in search of greener grass - lol.
Until then,
Kiera