you've changed.

As I approach 40, I'm finding that some things will be better left to my 30s and not revisited. In particular, I haven't the time for gossip and don't really care to hash out petty little problems that have no business seeming large when they are really small. I'm sure there are many other things I'll leave behind. I think I'm o.k. with this. Instead, I fill the space with activities that really are important, either to me or to the world at large. Things like encouraging my friends, making music (I actually lowered my blood pressure today while listening to music on the way to the doctor), writing whatever and whenever I can, work (on which I should focus more diligently), and school. Oh, and keeping the house from falling down. But really, that's just a series of chores that will likely never end.

I've changed, and mostly by my own volition. I'm interested right now in whether it's really that I've changed, or instead more or less evolved. But you never hear that about a person, coming from another person. You hear, "So and so has changed." Typically, this offering is of the negative (and equally gossip-y) sort...or perhaps that's just my own translation--though I think not. I don't really like hearing it this way. It's nonspecific and lazy. Perhaps we could say, "Wow, I never expected him/her to do that," or "I wonder what's making her so happy lately." A simple, "She used to do this, but she seems happier doing this." As for "He's/She's changed," I hate it. Especially when it's said with the implication that perhaps someone else has dictated your, my, his transformation.

What I know, or what I think I know by now is that change is hard for many, if not most people. It's uncomfortable. I get it. I really do. But what I do see in my own life is a lot of positive transformation occurring, both within me and around me. My significant is experiencing the same, perhaps in different ways, but we are growing together. We are also growing separately. What concerns me right now about this are the few times I've overheard (or when it's been shared with either one of us directly) that we are not celebrating our individuality. Apparently if say, we decline a drink one night or choose to stay home rather than run around on a cold night or whathaveyou, it must mean that we are experiencing a departure from our(true)selves.

All I can really think to say to this is that transformation sometimes means leaving one thing you are behind so that you can be the next thing you are supposed to be. Sometimes you can't be two things at the same time. I can't watch a movie and read a book at the same time. And doing one or the other more lately doesn't make me a movie buff or a bookworm. But hey, people like to label things--that's how they keep us all sorted. Some changes are temporary, of course. I may find when I'm 60 that I enjoy a good buzz every weekend. Right now I'm too busy for the ensuing hangovers. Also, my liver is very happy these days.

Anyway, if you're in it for the long haul, I'm happy to work with anyone having difficulty adjusting to the many transformations I and we and he are planning to experience. I look around me, and things look promising. I'm writing, my "other" is playing the guitar in the corner, and the house is otherwise peaceful and shut down for the night. If this isn't me, and it isn't him, I don't know what else we could be right now. And aren't we all subject to change?

not gonna not knock things down

From here on out, I'd like to refer to "my anxiety" as the "The Worry." The Worry is temporary, and often enough, unwarranted. It is not productive, nor is it a friendly face. It makes my friendly face ugly, from my mouth to my furrowed brow. The Worry makes me sit around counting blades of grass, tallying the numbers, and taking names. I realize that this is not the best I can do. I don't expect everyone who has anxiety to follow suit. Sometimes labeling something is comforting, but I'd like to label this in a way that says it isn't mine.

I am changing my face and anxiety's name so that I can take The Worry and hurl it into the woods--or the trash, whichever is closer.This may seem silly, but if I don't change its name, my anxiety is a piece of me. It's like my own arm, only it keeps hitting me. And I can't very well cut off my arm, now can I?

I don't have a lot in me today. I have cleaning to do. Because The Worry says I'd better do it so I don't come home to a messy house when we come back from a weekend away. It's Thursday, and The Fucking Worry is thinking about Sunday afternoon.

And I'm about to kick it's ass. By cleaning. Hmph.

The Profile Essay

Over the summer, my writing course gave me several prompts as fodder for short stories. This one is a profile of someone in my life that has changed me. I could have chosen anyone. At the time, I chose someone whom I hadn't spoken with in years, right up until our recent reconnect. It has been awesome to see our friendship bloom again. In fact, so much more has happened since, and now it seems unnecessary to write about it, because we're living it. 

Julie and I met in 1988 at the beginning of our freshman year in high school. This many years later, there are still so many things I don’t understand about our friendship, but of one thing I’m sure: we are in it for life.

I was in my second year at a private school for grades seven through 12. Eighth grade there had been terrible for me--I grew too fast and I was awkward looking. With my thick glasses, a very thin physique and hurtling toward six feet tall, I became the butt of most jokes. I say most, because there was only one person lower than me in the pecking order. I’ve heard that he never recovered. Back then, no one thought much about the bully. In fact, I’d venture to say their behavior was largely ignored, if not condoned. If you didn’t have the right hair, the right shoes, and a pair of socks to match every shirt, you were doomed. I was lucky to find a pair of pants that didn’t make me look as though I was waiting for a flood. One other thing about the 80s everyone should know: appearance was everything.

Determined to make a new start the next year, I’d convinced my parents to get me my first pair of contacts. When we went school shopping, I chose everything I wanted to wear very carefully. Some were just clothing patterns, which my step-mother spent the summer sewing. The first outfit I wore was a short, fitted black and white plaid skirt, with a white shirt, both of which were homemade. On my first day back to school no one sat at my table in the cafeteria before class and no one spoke to me. As it turns out, they didn’t recognize me; I was prepared to take advantage of this oversight. I sat with the new kids, and didn’t acknowledge the old kids. By the time they figured it out, it didn’t matter. I’d climbed up the ladder. A little.

When Julie walked into our homeroom on the first day of school, she immediately caught everyone’s eye. The boys turned and stared, and one in particular looked at her from a few desks away for the entire twenty-three minutes. She was wearing a matching sweater skirt and top, green and black. Her hair and makeup were done like a woman who’s been doing it for years. She wore heels. She was curvy for her age, but only looked older in body and dress. She also had an angry face. If ever you’ve heard of “bitchface,” she’s the one who first suffered of it. Basically, it means that you’re a girl whose face always looks like she’s pissed off about something, even when she’s not. Explaining this to potential dance partners at the clubs many years later was a challenge. Now it’s a thing. Go figure.

That first day at lunch, I made sure to get in line behind Julie at the soda machine. I had in my mind constructed the perfect ice breaker:

“That guy Matt was staring at you in homeroom,” I said.

“Really,” she said, turning around.

I wasn’t sure if it was disbelief or modesty. Either way, I’d hooked her. We talked all through lunch, and I learned that she had a job. I thought, “Wow, this girl has it together. I want a job, too.” She said she cleaned rooms at one of the local motels on Saturdays and Sundays. Everything she said made her seem so…adult. I learned that she had a little brother 13 years younger than her. And that she liked Def Leppard, too. I’m pretty sure toward the end of lunch I admitted that I was a nerd, and that hanging around with me wasn’t going to make her any friends, but she didn’t care.

We talked often on the phone after that, and she didn’t live far from me. I found out that her best friend Wendy was already in her 20s. Julie loved her dearly, and there were times I wondered if Julie would ever consider me as good a friend as she did Wendy. At this point, both Wendy and I have both had our fair share of ups and downs with her, and I’m pretty sure we’ve made her equally angry at different times over the course of the 20 some odd years I’ve known her.

Flashback to 1988. On my birthday—September 29th—Julie called. She invited me to go with her and her mom to see, yes, Def Leppard. I had never been to a concert and even now, I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun on my birthday. Julie and I danced and sang along, while her mom sat a few rows back and kept an eye on us. I’d look at her mom every now and then and she would laugh and make fun of the boys who were playing air guitar a few seats over from Julie and me. Julie’s mom was a rocker, too. She liked her music, though often enough Julie hated what her mother liked: Pink Floyd, The Moody Blues, Blue Oyster Cult, The Police… So much great music—and she had it all on eight track. But the one band Julie really hated that her mother liked is Rush. I loved their music, too. Julie’s mom and I planned later that she and I would go to a Rush concert together. I would do anything for that chance, even today.

For the next four years, in spite of us changing schools and my parents moving our family a town over, we were inseparable. I got a job with her at the motel and got to know Wendy, as she worked there, too. I can’t say we ever liked each other. There, Julie and I tried our first cigarettes. We met our first crushes. We drank for the first time. We also saw a lot of things young, teenage girls probably shouldn’t see. But I got to know her parents. I fought with my parents, and therefore became a fixture at Julie’s house. They fed me, they housed me, and they let me smoke cigarettes in the house. But mostly they listened to me. Especially her mother. I, in turn, would scratch her back which she loved. I learned a lot of things about Julie this way, not because her mother told me, but because I saw all of it close up and personal. Some of it wasn’t pretty.

I didn’t know that Julie’s curves were the product of a self-perceived weight problem she had in middle school. I saw pictures, and her face was chubby, but if it was baby fat before, she’d turned it into something that made her feel much more confident. Julie resented the fact that her mother had a baby so late in life, and that it interfered with Julie’s expectation that she would continue to be an only child through her teen years. The most important time of her life! She also resented me sometimes. In fact, it was she who ratted me out to her parents for smoking. What made it worse was that they didn’t much care. Her dad and I sat at the bar overlooking the open dining room and living room regularly, drinking coffee, smoking butts and talking about our lives. Julie and I fought like sisters. But she cared. She thought I threw away a perfectly good life by leaving home. My parents had money. We had a nice house. And I didn’t have a three year-old brother.

At the end of our sophomore year, Julie’s mother was diagnosed with Leukemia. I wasn’t living there at the time, and only a year passed before she died. It seemed like a day. She made it into remission for a few months, but that nasty sickness got her. I didn’t see her in the week before she died. Julie did, and she was so very angry. With me, with her mom and dad…with cancer. My father and I attended the funeral. She asked me to stand with her in the receiving line, so I did. We cried, we lamented, and sometimes we were filled with regret. Other times we joked along with her grandmother that Julie’s mom might just sit up in her coffin and flip us all off. But the same as Julie did years later when our friend Christian committed suicide, she cried for me. For the world of hurt I was experiencing. I remember her saying as she and I stood over Christian’s closed casket, “Look what you did to my friend.”

None of this is to say we didn’t have our trials and tribulations. Sometimes I’d get so wrapped up with a boy that I’d abandon her for months. Sometimes I didn’t like her boyfriends (rightfully so) so she’d disappear for a year. When we argued, it most times ended with us not speaking for long stints. But our history always brings us home. Not to her old house—it’s since been purchased by a bus company and levelled for parking. Her father started a career in drinking and hasn’t been seen for at least ten years. Her brother is a lazy, out of work couch surfer. No, home is wherever we are together.

Our most recent separation lasted five years, over something trivial. Almost a misunderstanding, but I hurt her feelings. This time was one too many times. In my defense, she is very sensitive, though you wouldn’t always see it through the anger. She doesn’t always say much, and less often tells you what she needs. I try to guess but I’m not a mind reader—man alive. At the end of the five years, I’d found that my life was missing something without her. As much as I also felt hurt by her constant judging, I thought she must have been trying to protect me. Sometimes from others, and more often than not from myself and any number of my own questionable decisions. For all of her faults, she’s never steered me wrong. Except maybe that one time when she set me up with her boyfriend’s 21 year old friend. I was 15.

This time, it’s taken several months for us to regain our faith and trust in each other. She’s had two babies, one 18 months before we reunited, and another about a month after we began talking. She let me meet them both almost immediately after we had reconnected. We laughed and I made her cry. The biggest difference between us is that I do talk about my feelings. Sometimes to the extreme. One thing she said that made me know that we are exactly in the right place at the right time, and that she truly loved who I’ve become is that she’s never felt overcome by how intensely I tackle a problem. When things get crazy, I take them on in a big way. My sister runs, and my mother and father tell me to calm down. I’ve terrified more than one potential suitor in my 39 years. But Julie isn’t like that. She takes it all in, without flinching.

I couldn’t be more proud of Julie for daring to have children later in life. Her pregnancies weren’t easy, but she took it in stride. Her kids, though, are perfect in every way. They are wonderful and smart, and they bring out the very best in their mother. I’ve never seen Julie feel so loved, and love so much in return. I’ve never seen from her the level of patience she exhibits when her children cry or whine, or when Mikey, her oldest misbehaves. He’s two now, and the thing I love to hear more than anything is his little voice saying my name. I’ve never felt so much affection for a friend’s children as I do now. I love that her heart is so full, and that every time she hugs them her face softens a little.

the glorification of a job well done.

Well, sometimes mistakes repeat themselves. As in, think for a while, have an idea, pursue idea, and reap the wrath of presenting said idea. I don't think this is how it's supposed to work. I guess I've never had to explain in quite so much minutia what it means to feel creative. There...I said it. I don't think creative. I feel it. In my gut, like I need it to survive. 

The same as I require food, a roof over my head that doesn't subject me or my loved ones to negativity and strife, and therefore a job. School is something I do on the side, because again I need to learn. I need to feel what it's like to learn from people who have been there, on the other side. I have some respect for my professors. Lifelong learning is for me. Lifelong schooling, probably not. But at this stage, continued education will help me in my job, and as I'm learning, in my life's work. It's taught me that I know very little, and yet I've learned so very much. It's a conundrum of sorts, as I think for me, recognizing my weaknesses helps me locate my strengths. And this leads to a whole lot of self-doubt, which can be crippling. But only if I let it. 

I can say I'm wise, but this doesn't make it so. Not even if I say it one hundred more times. Wisdom, I think is something we obtain quietly, without much fuss. It typically comes on gracefully, but often enough it arrives painfully followed by a sort of sadness. Sadness that it took you so long to figure it out, sadness that the time in your life that was easy going and breezy has passed--even sadness that you don't even see it coming. It just eases its way into your bones; into the farthest reaches of your heart. It's acceptance and it is all of the things you've ever fought. Win or lose. 

It may be easier to judge another person's plight. This kettle's been called out too many times not to recognize that it's easy to hate what you can't understand. Most of the time we spend looking at someone else and judging is simply a way to avoid introspection. I know this because I do it more regularly than I'd like. It's this fault in my process that makes me the most unhappy with myself. What I've learned to do is turn it around as often as I can and look at what I can do to make me the person I know I can be. As in the best version of me that I'm capable of becoming at the time. Because I can't "fix" someone else. 

That's not to say I'm broken. Just bruised and tired. Still--a little self-awareness goes a long way. 

The Color Essay - an assignment

I thought after two months of writing classes, I'd post a little bit about what I've been doing in lieu of blogging. It's been busy, and even my final drafts need some tweaking, but I've enjoyed the exercise of writing more or less daily, even if it wasn't here.

Take One of These

Yellow. The color of two of my childhood homes. We moved from Massachusetts to Shreveport, Louisiana when I was three. My father had been transferred at work, so he left ahead of us and bought us a large ranch-style house with a carport and yellow siding from a writer and director of several B-rated horror movies. I don’t recall the move, but I do remember the house. It had a large kitchen with a bar overlooking the living room, a dining room, three bedrooms and a bath. It was 1977 and in the seventies, whatever wasn’t orange or yellow was brown. The living room was dark sometimes, as it was built toward the back of the house and had no windows. The other rooms were plenty sunny, and the grass grew as green as I’ve ever seen. My mother would sometimes make us picnic lunches to take outside and sit by the swing set to eat. Our neighbor, Rose, would often come to the chain-link fence that enclosed the backyard to chat with my mother.

For the most part, we enjoyed the house and the new location. We made new friends; my mother began a new part-time job as a real estate agent. Since both of my parents worked, we were occasionally left with a babysitter for several hours at a time. As many parents may know, teenaged babysitters often prefer to watch television or talk on the phone than play with bratty children. I took full advantage. By my mother’s account, I once “painted” the tub with bismuth because I wanted it to be pink. I shook baby powder across my brown bedroom rug because I wanted it to be white. I vaguely remember the latter act. I also recall feeding my sister and myself—one spoonful at a time—the entire contents of the grape cough medicine I’d found in the cabinet. That time, my father caught us and swooped us up into the bathroom. Panicked, he made us swallow a raw egg each, whole. If you’ve never swallowed a raw egg whole, I don’t recommend it. Unless, of course, you need urgently to throw up.

Most of all I remember tossing my yellow blanket over my head and into the bed of my mother’s friend’s pickup truck. When my mother retrieved it for me, we discovered that it had landed in a motor oil spill to be ruined for good. It was a sad day. Almost more sad than the day my mother turned to me at the side door, suitcase in hand and told me I couldn’t come with her where she was going.

When my birth parents decided to divorce, my little sister and I moved back North with my Dad. This was best. The fighting between my mother and father back in Louisiana had caused my sister to be ill; later, it made me ill as well. I recall that my father was a wreck. He had two little girls, and he didn’t even know how to style their hair, let alone feed them and dress them. Two months after we arrived in Massachusetts, my now step-mother then father’s girlfriend Cindy moved to Massachusetts to be with us. I was just glad that we didn’t have to eat cereal for dinner anymore. I can only imagine how relieved my father was. She was only 26, but she had helped raise three of her four brothers. My father was eight years her senior, and we were five and three. Thankfully, she was wise beyond her years.

About a year later, we moved from the small garden-style apartment where we had been living into a yellow cape with dormers and brown shutters. They married after a year and held the reception at the house. My sister loved Cindy dearly from the start. I regret that I appreciated her presence much less. It took me nearly 12 years to call her Mum. It took 20 years for my sister and me to start calling my birth mother, “the mother.” I don’t know why we do this, except that it helps us differentiate between two. Perhaps after that many years apart, your mother is your friend and a mother—just not your mother. I still feel badly if when talking to the mother I refer to Cindy as “Mum.”

Neither the mother nor my Mum would have guessed that my father would turn out to be an alcoholic. How my Mum has remained married to him is beyond what I can yet comprehend. Three years in therapy, and when it comes to my Dad’s illness, I got nothing’. None of us recognized it or saw it coming. When I recall our days in the yellow cape house, I remember his large brown ashtray full of butts next to a glass of gin and tonic (no rocks) sitting on the coffee table next to his recliner. And I remember he loved us very much. Sometimes, when we were riding in his little Datsun, he’d turn to me and ask, “How come you’re so cute?” I called him “Daddy” until I left home.

By all appearances, we led a charmed family life. Our house was huge compared to our friends’ houses, and my father built us a pool. He wasn’t a muscular man, nor was he handy; instead rather tall and lanky, like me. But he was dedicated and determined. We all watched “The Muppet Show” every week as a family. My father and I watched “Creature Double Feature” together on Saturday mornings—just the two of us, as my sister was terrified of the shows. On Saturday mornings he either made us elephant-shaped pancakes, or picked up doughnuts on his way home from work. He was the production manager at a tool and die company, and worked as hard as I’ve ever seen anyone work. He had been there 35 years when according to him, without as much as a warning they laid him off. I don’t think he’ll ever recover from the shock.

Everything he did, he either for us, or for work. Nothing else mattered to him. Whenever I went somewhere I shouldn’t, he found me. When my softball coach insisted I play right field, or often enough, not at all for an entire season, my father insisted the coach move me to where there would be more action. Win or lose, he warned the coach that I was there to play softball, and that I would play softball. When the kids started to make fun of me and my lanky and four-eyed appearance, he gave me the best fatherly advice ever. “When the kids give you shit, punch them in the face,” he said. “They won’t bother you again.” So when my neighbor looked me in the eye and said, “At least I don’t have to go to a psychiatrist,” I slapped her right across the mouth. He was right; she never bothered me again.

My sister and I got bikes for Christmas, and dad took us a street over to the dead end to teach us how to ride. Every time he told my sister to just keep pedaling, she would whine and answer, “I can’t.” His patience wore thin, and he threw my sister’s bike in the bushes. “Now you can’t,” he said. I remember her, terrified and crying in the road, and I remember pulling her bike out of the bushes and walking it home for her. He was always infuriated when I was late home from the movies. Or anywhere. He was worse when I started getting C’s instead of A’s and B’s. Don’t get me started about the F. My sister cried a lot. My father yelled a lot, and so did I.

Eventually, my parents sold the house we grew up in. Maybe we grew out of it. We got a new house in a new town, where we went to a new school. The house was blue. It was on a cul-de-sack with a long, paved driveway and a two car garage. It was nearly 2000 square feet with a wraparound porch. As large as it was, it wasn’t big enough for the four of us. My father threw me out over and over again. I had two years of high school to go. During my senior year, he threw my bed down the stairs, out the front door, and over the porch onto the lawn. I didn’t know what to else to do, so I called a friend’s mother to pick me up and moved out for good. I was 17.

I’m 39 now, and my father is still on the sauce, so they say. He has the early stages of liver disease, but he doesn’t know that “fatty liver” test results mean he has sustained damage from the years of alcohol abuse. He doesn’t yet know that the color yellow is coming for him, but I do. He tells me that he’s sorry he wasn’t a better father. The thing is, he was. I tell him so, but his wires are crossed—he doesn’t receive the message. I tell him he can be a better father now, because now is what really counts. But he’s sad and lonely no matter what anyone says, even his first daughter. This, because his only friend is Smirnoff. I don’t much care for that guy.

I have what they call “generalized anxiety disorder.” Maybe it’s hereditary, and maybe it’s just life. All I know for sure is that the little yellow pills I take make it better. I struggled with the idea of medication for a long time. I knew I had been o.k. once, but the longer I fought it, the farther from o.k. I drifted. I thought I must be able to manage on my own, and I held out for two years. I couldn’t travel, I hated crowds, and every time I ate it felt like I was choking. When I couldn’t breathe anymore and I could no longer tell the difference between happy and anxious, I took the script and filled it. I wanted to drive again. I wanted to work. Most of all I wanted to live fearlessly and fiercely again. Yellow to me is home. It is fear, and it is disease. And yellow is for Paroxetine Hydrochloride. I know now that sometimes good people fall on terrible times. That we can’t judge a person’s character by their illness, as humans are so prone to do. I try to remember this every day. What would you do?

except for nothing.

Another day of sick, and I'm ready to jump out the window. Fourth of July didn't happen with a bang, but every day can't be the best day. I feel like I want to melt into the abyss of my couch as Love It or List It pokes and prods my brain in the background pulling me in and out of a reality best suited for people much stronger than me. Virus=1. Me=negative 3. I am pooped. 

Tired of the psychological effects of people having ripped scabs off of cuts that should have healed, but clearly hadn't. One more, and they may find that they've sabotaged the only possible shiny piece of metal to come out of the wreck. Is that the intent? Probably not. At least not a conscious intention. Know thyself. Know that when you look into the magic mirror it may say you're the fairest, but in the end the outside isn't what keeps your heart full of joy. That said, throwing poisonous apples at the problem certainly won't fix it.

I dreamed of a pack of wolves this weekend. They chased us and hounded us. They killed geese, which also chased us. By all accounts, this means I need to be self-sufficient, and not indulge my thoughts when they begin to consume me. Some things are indeed beyond my control. That leaves me to accept the rain, accept the thunder, and accept that the grass will grow without me. That reminds me of something I learned a long time ago, and then went ahead and forgot. Don't plant weeds where you want a flower to grow. 

I realized one big difference between me and a bitter soul. I do things because I want to share my love. I want to share my insides with anyone who'll have the guts to look at them. To accept them. Performing, creating, making beautiful things can only become me if I put the best of me in the forefront. I just don't feel like things can be beautiful for any other reason. And then...the pressure was off. 

"Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful, except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it? Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

yellow blankie.

When I was just a little girl in Louisiana, my mom's friend came by in her pick up truck to take us out for a little while. I have no idea where we were going, but like most little girls, I wanted to bring my most beloved thing with me. I hurled my yellow blankie with the satin edges I used to rub under my nose up over the bed of the truck. I had no idea that this decision would lead to a world of hurt. When my mom retrieved it, it was covered in motor oil. Ruined.

Sometimes our own insecurities get the best of us. Sometimes when you take the things that make you feel secure along for the ride, you single-handedly ruin the thing you needed the most. And then you grow. You realize maybe you didn't need it as much as you thought you did. In the end, you say leaving that behind is best. Primarily because you have to.

I'm not insecure about my ability to write. To think. To observe. My writing is a place where I go to take all of these observations and turn them into something beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking. Other times it's funny and cheap. But no matter which thing it is, I'm confident I'm doing it well. During a recent writing course I took, my peer reviewers seemed to genuinely enjoy the stories, and pointed out things I could do better. They are not writers, they said, but it didn't matter. They were my audience, and if they couldn't grasp something, I knew I needed to so something to make it clearer. I don't write for others, but I do write to connect with people. If something is keeping them from accessing my "art" then I'm damn well going to hear them and try my best to make it better. What I don't want to do is put myself above them and say that because they are not writers the same as me, that their observations are invalid. It is counterproductive for me, and condescending and insensitive to them. As I reviewed their work, I pointed out what I felt was good or came through the best, and suggested mostly that they write the way the speak. One of them quoted me in their final essay, and said that it was the most valuable thing they received from their peer reviewers.

I may not be enlightened, but I am lighter today than I've felt recently. To say that my observations are not valid because I am not as good as, as productive as, as creative as my peers is to say that one has nothing left to learn.

I was confident in my ability to write before I took my introductory writing course. I mean, I've already been a paid writer. My experience must speak to something. I tried twice to test out of it, and missed it by a very small margin. I could have tried a third time, but instead said to myself, "I can always learn something." I stayed in a class full of people who claimed not to be writers. Who had never written before. Some of whom will probably try to avoid it at all costs. And in the end, I learned as much from them as I did from the instructor and any professional writers I've ever read. I am no better or worse than them. Just different.

I'm o.k. with that. With all of this. Some of us will part ways, and some of us will see each other in Writing II. I'm looking forward to reading what every last one of my classmates has to say, regardless of their background. I can't wait to see what I learn.