back to the drawing board

PC: Michelle Bongirno

At work, there is a floor to ceiling chalkboard and every day from 8 in the morning till about 8 at night children take chalk to its surface.

Layers upon layers of chalk, white-orange-pink-blue, dusts its surface until the layers of doodles and scribbles become pancaked on top of each other so much so it's hard to decipher the black of the board itself. Chalk dust that didn't quite stick has piled up onto the floor and on the hands and clothes of its artists.

And then we close, the children go home and maintenance comes to wipe it clean. All the labor and dreams spilled out on to its surface are scrubbed clean in one foul swoop, so that the next day another 12 hours of artistry can grace its plains.

In a half joking manner, I told my friend that I'm going to call this season of my post-college life the "back to the drawing board" phase, because, if anything, nothing has gone the way I planned or would have seen fit.

This job with the giant chalk board and the little Picassos, the one that was supposed to be a place holder until I landed my career job, is ending out of the blue. I'm being laid off at the end of the month. With a list of denials only growing longer by the day and being no closer to a job that requires my degree, I am left soon-to-be jobless without an option or a place to go.

When we heard the news, one of my coworkers looked at me with fear in her eyes and with terror-choked words she said, "What am I going to do?" There wasn't an answer. I had no advice, no understanding and no clue. All I could do was stare hard at her and see the reflection of myself in her eyes.

Being 20-something is very similar to having redeemed an E-ticket for the Hot Mess Express. You got onboard without fully comprehending the whole thing, but you were sold on the idea of going west in hopes for gold and your dreams.

Halfheartedly, I want to say I hate this part of my story. I want to raise that banner high and camp myself on one of those cramped benches on that train and write letters back home about all the horrible-rocky-uncertain-frustrating-confusing-daunting things about this season.

But, then I read quotes like this and I feel like these words are what my banner should actually read:

“Transition is a terribly uncomfortable place for you to be in your life. You will start hurting and not even understand where; you’ll think, I’ve never hurt like this before. I’ve never dealt with these kinds of problems. I’ve never been at this point in my life before.”

I'll be honest with you, I was afraid to call these feelings "hurt." It seems silly at first, doesn't it?

Hurt is a word we more often use to describe the bigger, bloodier, bolder problems -- not the bruises we attain by growing up. It makes me feel weak and unprepared to use it as a descriptor in this chapter of my story.

But, this is how I feel. And it isn't wrong or weird just because the world and all its fake-it-till-you-make-it bs says so. Or even because most adultier adults think you should be more joyful and less frazzled by the whole thing.

There is hurt while walking in this season and there is good too. It all goes hand in hand. To ignore the hurt would be silly and create an incomplete picture of what this season really looks like.

My letters home will continue to be filled with the hard and the confusing, but they'll also be the love letters of the now.

Sure, my chalk board has been scrubbed clean and my chalk is a little more crumbly and broken up than it was when I started. It's just the facts of my life right now.

Yet as I live in and through this season, I want to learn to be more like the little artists at work.

They have unrelenting and unashamed desires to still color when the board's been cleared and the chalk has run out. They don't rely on the chalk's permanence, because they know the lines they draw are easily undone. And even after days and weeks of asking, they continue to hold out hope for more chalk when the big box of colors has been all used up.

One day, I'll be lucky to be half as brave as them.

part 1: the first date chronicles - dylan

Photo c/o Clarissa Toll

Preface: This is an actual event that took place my junior year of college. I decided to write it as a third person narrative to challenge my story telling abilities and to make an awkward/hilarious encounter more relatable. Life is funny and it's worth telling the stories it hands you. So, without further ado...

She sat on the third floor of the library killing time during her three hour break between classes. She had cozied herself into an original to the building, salmon pink faded lounge chair by the window. Homework was well avoided during these breaks, and she quietly chuckled often while her nose was stuck in a favorite book and her fingers thumbed through its pages.

"Excuse me?" She looked up. A tall and lanky, pea-coat wearing boy around her age was motioning to the chair across from her. "Is anyone sitting here?" he asked. 

She smiled, uttered a quick "No, go ahead." and went back to her book as he sat down and pulled out his laptop. 

Her chuckling continued and she shared many a "i'm-sorry-if-this-is-distracting-but-you-chose-to-sit-here" smiling glances in his direction. With knowing eyes, his smirks told her it was fine and that his seat choice pleased him.

They went on like this for some time. Her chucking into her book and him smirking at the keys of his laptop. Finally, he broke the silence.

"What book are you reading?" he asked. She told him what it was, who wrote it and how it masterfully combined the heart wrenching with the comical facets of life. Interested, he wrote down it's title and author. Seemingly, he was fascinated with the idea of this book and the girl who had described it to him.

"I thought it was something you were reading for school with the way you were highlighting," he said as his eyes darted to the almost bone-dry yellow highlighter in her hand. She then had to explain her quirk of highlighting other's words; she loved them and those written in books weren't meant to be forgotten. Her explanation seemed to please him, he smiled and said "Your laughter told me otherwise, though."

They chatted a little while longer. What's your major, what year are you, do you often have a break this long, do you sit in the library often -- they rambled through the list of questions acquainted college strangers converse with and then it was time for the boy to stop avoiding life and head back to class.

He packed up his laptop and stood to leave, but hesitated slightly. It was like bravery rocked him back on his feet and said "If i'm going to read this book, I'm going to need some one to talk to about it. Can I have your number?"

She chuckled the nervous laughter that seems to come over all women who realize they are, in fact, being hit on and its no longer just a part of their imagination that they can down play. Thinking the boy clever with his tactics, it was hard not to give him a fair chance.

As she rattled off the digits, she realized neither of them knew the other's name. College students have this horrible talent of skipping over the basics and jumping right to the details. "My name is Clarissa, by the way."

"And what's your's?" she continued. "I'm Dylan Robert Higgins. My mom named me after Bob Dylan." he chuckled. Deadpan he followed up with, "But my customers all know me as 'Dyla The Microphone Killa.'"

Sensing her utter confusion, he then launched into a five minute explanation as to why he as an Apple Bee's server gets very bored and offers to rap for his tables. After the short anecdote he reflected "many of them don't seem to like it much..."

He had an unconventional sense of character and she liked it. She could use a dose of silly in her serious, well organized life.

As they said their goodbyes, she hoped he'd call. Well text, at least, because college students typically avoid phone calls like the plague (in effect, to a college student, a phone call is equal to committing to meet your family and the possibility of marriage all at the touch of the green button).

Or even better, perhaps they'd make a habit of running into each other in the library.

As he headed off towards the elevators, her carpool mates came off the lift.

"Do I have a story for you!" she said as they came close. Adrenalin was the sole reason her blood pumped in those moments as she recanted the encounter.

They'd squeal and giggle about the chance meeting all the way home. And as girls do, they'd dream about how "perfect" this was and would be. 

you are here

Photo c/o Michelle Bongirno 

They say:

"After further consideration, we have decided to pursue other candidates for this opportunity."

"Your qualifications were reviewed and while impressive, were not  a suitable match for this position."

Or, my personal favorite (heavy sarcasm, here), nothing. 

The list of noes has grown quite long on my end of things. Basically, I'm at the corner of Never Getting Another Interview Again and Job Applications Are The Worst. 

For the sake of transparency and at the risk of sounding dramatic, I write this. For myself mostly, but for the possibility of someone else too. I made a promise early on in my career-hunt that I would be honest about this process for those who are following after -- those soon-to-be career-hunters. The world has told a lot of fake-it-till-you-make-it stories and has neglected to get real about how mucky and rough this season can be. The trenches of in-between college and a career can feel lonely and beyond frustrating. I don't want to be another rose-colored, everything was fine type story. I want the it's-dark-here-but-I'm-holding-out-for-hope type stories, because really, if we get strikingly honest, that's all the stories of every chapter of our honest-to-goodness lives. No filters to hide the uncomfortable or squares to crop out the less-lovely; just the reality and truth remain. 

Last week, I was scrolling through social media. I saw that a friend of mine, same age and recent college graduate, was a speaker at a conference. My first thought: "and I'm just here." Just at a regular job that doesn't require my degree or special skills. Just getting denied applications. Just bored out of my mind. Just wanting more. 

After I pitched my tent for a short while in pity-ville and had a small pity-party of one, I got real honest about my "just." Well the Lord did, actually. 

I was looking at my life as the kind of just -- barely, by a little -- and desiring more of what the world would define as success. My idea of more had gotten quite empty. 

As I clung to this idea of just (the little kind), I was basically saying F-you to all the opportunities I have currently. In other words, I was claiming they weren't enough for me. 

How stupid, right? Who was I to claim they weren't enough? 

I have always had a hard time being in the moment. My goals and minute by minute living (at times) can be consumed with what's coming -- the what's next portion. As a child, my favorite questions were "What are we doing?" "Where are we going?" and "Because why?" They haven't much changed, if I'm being honest. I like being in the know, I like preparing and knowing whats coming. And I really, really like knowing the why to everything. In this season, especially, I have been struggling to be content in the right here and right now with most my questions still hanging in the unanswered category. 

I have to make a conscious effort to set my heart and my mind in the moment, every moment. To set it any where else, I become discontent. Which is only selfishness, because I have NO reason to be discontent -- whether or not I have a plan or the answers to my questions. 

I am blessed to have the opportunity to hold a job for the moment in a place in which I get paid to read books to children and hear them say "wead anotha book! wead anotha book!" a million times over. Where else would I get to add voices to the bears, lions, horses, and elephants and be silly for the sake of growing souls? My degree certainly doesn't house many of these opportunities, if any at all. 

To consider these moments "just" anything is ignorance at best. Sure roaring like a lion, picking up legos or wiping boogers were not what I expected to be doing after college, but gracious. I swear, glory exudes when a child laughs. Its a laugh that brings me back, back to contentment -- back to not seeing the "just." 

I know, in a way, I've said this all before in previous blog posts or in Instagram captions. But, these feelings and this season remind me how easily we, as human beings, forget to remember what we know. 

When I landed my current job, I wrote this: Four years ago I never thought that this is where I would be, but you know what? I'm so damn grateful for it. I'm going to glean from this time and I'll be a better praiser of my creator because of it... Where ever you are, lay down those lies you've accepted as truth from the world and find ownership and glory in the space you find yourself in. It's all so very worth it.

In the day in and day out it is so easy to lose sight of the importance of a current moment. If we really were to break it down, the compilation of all these right-now moments are what develop a life. We (I) get so lost in the loftiness of the future that we (I) neglect to glean from what's happening in the now. The future matters, it does, but I don't want mine to consume these days.

I want to be here right now. 

Some days its a harder struggle than others. But, it's a wrestling match worth my participation and the best fight I can muster. 

The applications and the noes are rough. The unknown and the unanswered nature of this season can be frustrating.

But. The yeses are there and the grace still abounds. 

This testament -- these words -- I write are for me (maybe for you, too) on the days when the right now feels heavy and not enough all at the same time, because those days will still come. And though that fact be true, I still push for hope. 

Because I know that I know that I know, I'm supposed to be here -- right now. 

stop acting like you know

Graduating college is very similar, I would assume, to getting married or having a baby, in the sense that you have a good indicator what all these large milestones in life will supposedly entail. Yet, you never truly know or understand what they are until you are in the thick of them.

I left college knowing it would be change, difference, and newness. I knew that my rhythm of life would adjust to a new normal. And I knew how this season looked from my head's perspective.

It's striking how big milestones and changes can reflect our humanness, like very few others can. We think we know, and then the change actually happens. 

A month post-graduation, I know that what I knew was very little like what I know now. 

The application process is both life-sucking and depressing. Its hard to keep laying yourself out on the track, each time hoping that the train will slow down and not crush you and a little part of your soul as it runs full steam ahead. Motivation runs dry very quickly and its much easier to clean out the years of stuff you've stored under your bed, than write cover letters that you know will return a "thanks, but no thanks" response. Or even worse, no response. 

I've noticed people asking me the "are you busy" question a lot more often. Not necessarily because its being asked of me more, but because I'd actually LIKE to be busy. No job, no school, and a cleaned out bed make for a boring set of 24 hours. It isn't a problem that they ask, it just makes a neon sign in my head of this slow-paced season and its turtle-like qualities. 

But the biggest thing I've realized in the beginning parts of this season:

This is the first time in my life that I don't truly have a plan. When I graduated from high school, I knew I was headed to college. Sure I didn't know what the heck I had gotten myself into, but I knew the general gist of things. When uncertainty started to crowd in, I could at least rely on an acceptance letter and what it implicated. 

This time around, the idea of a "career" isn't enough to call a plan. The variables are large and sometimes can cast big shadows onto the future. 

The other night my dear friend said, five years ago we thought you'd be married and settled, but "You have the world at your feet. Its so exciting." 

And it SO is. But having the world at your feet can be deeply unnerving. The world implicates many options with wide parameters. So many possible choices. 

I often half-heartedly joke that i'll take the first job that will pay me, but I also want to truly know that I have made the right choice. I don't want to pry open or slip through cracked doors. I know to the depths of my soul that the Lord opens doors, and I only want to run through those swung wide open. But this season makes for a lot of uncertainty when it comes to knocking on what seems like an endless slew of doors (kind of like Hilbert's Infinite Hotel). 

I thought I knew what this season and change would hold, but daily as I sift through more applications and stare out the window; I am reminded that I know nothing. 

One day, I'm sure I'll read this post as a girl who's too busy once again with a career she's living and say "Silly girl, you had no idea." But here's the paradox, that same girl will be uncertain of other things and she'll be waiting on a different unknown. 

So that's all to say, I should stop acting like I know and soak up what the Lord has to teach me in this season. Easier said than done, of course, but worth it just the same. 

Because life is built of seasons unknown, and by grace we survive. 

the end is NYE

If I could see your face and hear your heart right now, i'd tell you I feel a bit befuddled over the change of what is to be.

These past few days I have been mulling over what to say and how to feel about this last year; i've been struggling to pin point my exact sentiments and emotions of this past year. 

2015 was:

Turning 22. Graduating college. Adopting a kitten. Doing the real-deal job interviews. Taking a call from The New York Times. Discovering a potential eye disease. Feeling a February that felt like May. Competing my butt off at a state wide research competition. Seeking grace. Driving all day with a sweet red head just for Shake Shack. Ditching class for too much whipped cream on waffles. Rescuing vintage furniture from the side of the road. Trying pink hair. Celebrating weddings and mourning a missed first birthday. Clinging to sunrises and knowing the proximity of Terror. Seeing love in the shade. Wearing plaid pants. Laughing at two ever so much in love from the backseat. Eating pizza in a car with a piece of Broadway blaring. Watching hummingbirds grow. Retexturing ceilings and cursing popcorn. Telling the story of Special Olympics athletes. Becoming a twitter-er. Falling in love with yoga. Slapping on a fresh coat of paint. Wearing all the stripes. 

It sounds redundant and pointless to say that change is coming. Because, every single year the calendar changes and we change with it. Its nothing new.

Maybe we don't change in all the big and loud ways every time, sometimes -- most times the change is subtle. But those subtleties, by the end of the year or season or moment, some how make us. 

We pour so much into our days here this side of heaven, consciously and subconsciously, that by the end of the year I always feel a little drained.  The goodbye, the hello, the hope, and the dread all are rolled into the passing of another year. 

2016 will beckon a lot of change into my life. It will usher in so much unknown. 

And the only way to begin is to start. Yet, there is always this moment of pause and reflection as the end draws nye. I love that we as creatures are conscious of moments, spaces, and times. We know we are mere mortals and in the end our time always draws short. It is a privilege to understand time and to recognize its beauty. 

As the clock strikes midnight and the champagne is popped, all will be as it should be. 2016 will begin and begin its process of ending all at once. How strange and wonderful.

Jesus, you go before. 

what it feels like right now

Photo c/o Michelle Bongirno 

11 days.

We are a band of misfits. Some of us contemplating medical school and the daunting days it has in store with an exhausted body and soul. Some of us hold the unknown between our fingertips as we grasp the stacks and stacks of job applications, all of which make us feel uneasy, under qualified, and some what worthless. Some of us are just trying to hang on till graduation, because our minds and souls are wrung out and stretched too thin to think about anything else.

We are all charting waters and setting out onto paths for the first time, perhaps really for the first time in our young twenty-something lives, we set out alone. The routines and the rhythms we've known for 16+ years don't apply anymore and we must begin anew, like never before.

Beginning college wasn't the same as high school or middle school or elementary school, but it held the same sorts of principles that made the transition easier and more understandable. Yet, this time, the path isn't set and the variables are unlimited. While this transition is exciting and fresh, its scary and leaves us lying awake at night contemplating even the slightest bends and curves in the road. 

So when you ask a college student a little under 2 weeks away from graduation if they are excited, please don't expect us to be elated or jumping for joy. We're wrung out, practically terrified, and having serious thoughts of running away. It's just the truth. 

We will pull ourselves up by our bootstraps by the time we have to glide across the stage wearing funny hats and robes, but in the mean time, be patient with us. We ARE excited. We ARE looking forward to the fresh and the new. BUT. We are exhausted. And the light at the end of the tunnel is so close, its no longer at the end but blaring. We are blinded by the impending reality that is graduating from college.

We're sad too. Sometimes that's even hard for us to fully grasp or admit.

We've grown roots and become attached to the people and places, the sights and the smells. Basement offices have become our second homes and tucked away cozy corners of the library are our safe spaces. We know quite well the hum of the classrooms and the people who inhabit them. We choke up as professors, who pushed us and taught us more than just textbooks, hug us and tell us they wish us best. We're sentimental over the simplest card games, because the reality is we will most likely never be squished around the table with these people, our people, again. The idea of leaving this "home" and whispering those goodbyes make our hearts ache in ways we never expected.

Life is sending us on. Its beautiful and hard, but worth it just the same.

We are all going to seek a great perhaps, yet in these last few days let us live in the now.

11 days. 

ends and tunnels

The beginning of the end. There's light at the end of the tunnel.

I have uttered these cliches more times than I can count over the last few months in preparation and as the result of beginning my last quarter of college (this past September). 

I graduate this coming December. December 12th to be exact.

I have 10...err...11ish weeks left of my 4 year stay, a stay in which I used to think would last an eternity. 

I created this blog at the beginning of this stay, in the summer of 2011, as a way to process and write this chapter of my life as it played out. I've semi-regularly chronicled the moments of this chunk of time for a little over 4 years now and it feels strange to be on the other end of that timeline now. Good. But, nevertheless, strange. 

Some parts of me have begun to let go and look towards the new chapter I am entering into, I have applied and interviewed for my first career possibility and am knee deep in the application process for the second, but with the voice of my high school associated student body adviser in my head, I am attempting to "be in the moment." To not rush these last weeks, to not start cutting the strings, to not halt the growth and the learning that is left. 

And if I am being honest, I'd say i'm not ready to write the thank you notes and the goodbye letters. I'm not yet okay with walking away and leaving what feels like my basement turned second home. I will be come December, but not here in the October or November. Not here in the in-between(s). Not in the climax of this story. 

There's still the fresh and eager 8 who make up the News section to work with and teach.

There's still the Senior Project left lying incomplete and ill-equipped on the edge of the desk.

There's still the backdrop of mountains, who are the friction love child of fault line(s), against the blue to be admired. 

There's still roller chair derby tournaments and rounds of BS to conquer in a echoy basement on nights that last just shy of dawn. 

There's still cramped fingers to be had from lectures and fast paced notes. 

There's still things to be learned, laughter to be had, and life to be lived. 

I'll save the nice wrap up and the eulogy of my college career for a later date.

For now, though, I'll live this season.