What Next?

Well, I'm now a college graduate.  I graduated from Geneva this past Monday at 10 am. I really feel like I accomplished a lot during my time there, socially, emotionally, spiritually and academically. Those were my favorite 4 years of my life thus far.  It's exciting to be done, but extremely sad that I'll never be an active part of that community anymore. There will always be alumni stuff to do, and I can always go visit my friends who are still there (which I plan to do a lot this fall), but still, a major part of my identity has been lost, or at best altered irrevocably.

I definitely grew a lot as a writer there. From actually learning the nitty gritty details of English grammar and syntax and how to manipulate those things for rhetorical/emotional effects to learning just what characters ARE and what they do and how they do it, I really feel like I've become a "writer" there. Not just a person who likes to dabble in writing, or a person who likes to discuss it, not even just a person who likes to practice the craft--I feel like I gained the title of Writer as my main identity. It's like I gained a lifestyle, not just a set of skills and competencies. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the amazing professors I had there, and my wonderful fellow writers who went through the same journey with me.

Since I won't be going to grad school till at least next year, I have some choices to make about what to do in the meantime. For the summer, I landed a nice internship at my local newspaper as a reporter/photographer ($8-9 an hour [not sure yet], 40 hours a week plus possible overtime) and living at home. After the summer I plan on getting a place with a friend back in Beaver Falls, but I don't have any good jobs lined up yet; therefore much of my summer will be spent trying to find jobs down there, preferably doing editorial/reporting work for a paper, or copyediting or something. If it comes right down to it, I'm willing to get a mundane job in something not in my field for a while.

I'll use my off-time this summer to continue writing (finish the 1st draft of a novel I started as an independent study, work on short stories and poems, and maybe start a scholarly paper I've had in mind) and to visit friends and do vacation-y things. (Like a possible trip to NYC to see Wicked on Broadway, and going to Texas for a week or so to visit my beautiful sisters, and a weekend camping trip with old friends.)

I'm still sad over my identity change. It feels like someone took the fabric of my identity and tore it up into pieces, and now I have to pick them up and try to make something new with them. I really learned to open up at Geneva; I learned to let people love me--that I am, in fact, worth loving--and I learned to love them in return, and I learned that I really do love people, and that my friends are probably the most amazing people I may ever know. I'll be writing a lot of letters to them and my favorite professors, whom I've also befriended on a personal level. Like I told my Geneva friends in a lengthy note, I don't really believe in "goodbye." Maybe "so long," "see ya later," but not "goodbye." I think "goodbye" is just an accidental byproduct of relational neglect.

Before I go off on a long rant about relationships and identity unrelated to writing (though those things ARE, in an indirect sense, related), I'll just finish by saying that I'm sad it's over, but I'm also excited about what the future might hold. As a writer, I think every experience, negative or positive, builds character and gives infinite more material for my writing. So my goal is to be open to all experiences but still be connected to everyone and everything I'm "leaving behind." Life should be like a rolling snowball: it just gets larger and larger, and everything that came before is just as much there as the new accumulation. A tree, as it grows, doesn't become hollow, or lose any of its rings--what came before is the foundation for what is to come.