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I’ve been “writing” this last column in my head for weeks now. Little bits and pieces of incoherent thoughts pop up here and there, but the pieces are scattered and out of place. I’ve always found the hardest thing about writing to be cementing a beginning, middle and end. It’s because we know, in theory, what we want to say, but putting it into words suddenly makes it an incomprehensible muddle.
I vividly remember sitting at the kitchen counter two years ago on that afternoon in the last week of May. Sleep deprivation from a grueling finals week had thankfully given way to the lazier days of mindlessly scrolling, clicking and reading. I was relieved to be done. Sophomore year was now over and the residual aftershocks of my year of the “Why?” were slowly settling in as my new normal.
We met in a tiny room in the Allen Building for one of those long once-a-week super-classes. It was the second semester of my junior year, and I came back to Duke after spending the Fall semester abroad feeling restless. Time was “running out” for me to learn how to be a writer. While I was abroad, one of the essays I submitted to the popular millennial blog, Thought Catalog, had been miraculously picked from the bottomless slush pile. Getting published and seeing my work in “print” up there on the site was thrilling. It was a feeling that escapes words, as ironic as that may sound. The only trouble was that all I wanted to do now was write.
I once tweeted at Twitter asking them for a job at their company. Jezebel had just written a post about the tech company’s “woman” problem (no women on the board), so I naturally jumped at the opportunity, linking the article and tweeting: “I am a VERY skilled tweeter…Hire me @Twitter?”
Around this time two years ago, I was huddled up on the stairs behind Friedl with tears running down my cheeks, shaking uncontrollably. I remember calling my dad at work as soon as I got out of class.
I was sitting outside of a cafe in Los Angeles when I saw him out of the corner of my eye. Every step seemed so labored, and the wheels of his walker scuffed against the sidewalk before he plopped down into a seat a few feet away from me with a resounding thud.
On the first night of winter break, I was rummaging through a stack of mail on the counter. At the bottom of the pile, I found a slim envelope addressed to me from my grandmother. Ever since I was a little girl, my grandmother would send me newspaper clippings—articles flooded with the latest happenings in the figure skating world and, as of late, ones pertaining to feminism and/or Gloria Steinem due to my recent summer stint writing for Ms. magazine in Los Angeles. The letter was postmarked on Nov. 13, 2013. It was now well into December. “PopPop and I are ‘hanging in,’” she wrote near the end. I paused. The pairing of “PopPop and I” at first sounded so normal, but something felt off.
