peer pressure, i suppose.

Being the type of person with a general attitude somewhere along the lines of, "IDGAF," peer pressure isn't usually a problem for me. The only people I've ever really felt the desire to emulate are my brothers--and The Doctor, I guess, but that's outside the realm of possibility, I think. Nobody can be that awkward.

Tonight, though, I experienced peer pressure. We had a little freshman orientation event, a dance on a boat, and all the girls on my floor were getting dressed. I decided to wear a loose, comfortable dress. It's cotton, with a multicolored design and it belts just underneath my chest.

I thought it was cute, and also that 'cute' was enough. But then I saw the other girls on my floor getting dressed... in shorts, tight tops, body-con skirts, camisoles, etc. Everything was tucked in and on display and I felt... frumpy.

One of the girls offered to let me wear some of her clothes, and I said, "No, thanks." I was proud of my cute little dress, and my minimal make-up and my lazy hair. I thought I looked nice.

But then, as a few minutes ticked by and the girls fluttered around in the hallway, I started to get anxious. I wondered what everyone else would be wearing. I wondered what the other girls would look like. Before I even knew what was happening, my mouth was opening and I was saying, "You know, I might want to wear one of her skirts, after all..."

Things got a little out of control, then. Before I could say, "Gallifrey," I found myself in a body-con skirt and a top that showed off a little bit of my sides, a little bit of my back. I was standing in my room and someone was holding a mascara wand up to my face and saying, "Blink. Blink. Blink."

(I should have known then and there that this was going to be a disaster. Anybody worth their salt knows that the proper strategy is don't blink. Don't even blink.)

I'm not going to blame the girls on my floor for being enthusiastic about their little human Barbie experiment. They're girls; they like clothes and fashion and dressing up and everything. I like those things, too, just on a different scale. In a different style.

I was excited at first, about being pretty... about maybe even being sexy. When we were waiting to go to the boat I was taking pictures with everyone and laughing and smiling and showing off my outfit.

But then I got on the boat, and pretty promptly lost all the girls I'd arrived with.

It wasn't really anybody's fault; there were a lot of people on that boat, and the crush of bodies combined with the darkness made it pretty much impossible to keep track of someone without literally holding their hand.

When I lost the girls from my floor, I wandered off and found some of my Leadership friends, and then I started to feel uncomfortable. They were all dressed conservatively, cutely, in t-shirts and shorts and the occasional sundress. They were demure while I was brash. They were conservative while I felt like a bit of a side-show.

I spent most of the night in a circle of awkward kids who couldn't dance any better than I could, and I enjoyed their company. I enjoyed their company while the girls I'd come with danced in the crush of bodies, bumping and grinding and doing things with their hips that I could honestly never dream of doing.

There was an after-party, after the boat docked, but I came straight back to my dorm. I washed off the mascara that made my eyes look too fake and I took off the skirt that was so tight I had to keep my knees tightly together all night just to preserve my own modesty.

Now, laying here in a pair of shorts and one of my cousin's old muscle shirts, with my computer on my lap and some Jack Johnson playing, I feel more like myself than I did all night. I feel comfortable and at peace, if a little ashamed of myself for caving to the peer pressure in the first place.

I wish I hadn't. I wish I'd worn my cute dress and my real smile, not my fake one. I wish I'd been comfortable enough to go crazy with my friends like I did at Culture Night, but the outfit inhibited me. I wanted it in the first place to feel more comfortable, but in the end it made me retreat into my shell.

I guess you're never too old to cave to peer pressure; even though it was a bad experience, and even though I wish I could take it back, I feel like I learned something here. Maybe once I stop feeling like such a jackass I'll be able to absorb the lesson.

(Ten points to everyone who caught the Doctor Who references. They weren't very subtle.)

my feet are lost upon this earth;

the grass is flat beneath them.

my mind is lost among these clouds;

my thoughts have taken flight.

I see, I think, I hear, I want

to touch and taste and feel

and be—

be lost upon this endless earth,

the grass beneath my feet.

be lost among these cotton clouds,

the wind beneath my wings. 

college, excel, and feelings.

As I write this, it is 10:13 on a Thursday night, the 23rd of August 2012. On Sunday, I moved in to my college dorm room and now I’m doing laundry for the first time.

My classes don’t start until Monday, but Orientation started today. My college has a program called Leadership, and I applied to and was accepted to it, so I had to move in early and attend a weeklong “retreat” (essentially) called EXCEL.

Let me just say that EXCEL was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done in my life.

There were about sixty freshmen in my EXCEL group (called a Cohort; we’re Cohort 26) and about twenty to twenty-five leaders. We were broken up into ‘Small Groups’ with two to three leaders to a group, and throughout the week we interacted with our own small groups and with other small groups and were often broken up into different, temporary small groups. It was fantastic. Just fantastic.

I’ve never been around so many like-minded people with the same ideas and goals and priorities as me. I’ve never been around so many people who genuinely valued me for who I was and who appreciated the things I think and say. I’ve never been around so many people who immediately accepted me as I was, no matter what I wore or how I spoke or what I did and did not do. It was enlightening. It was encouraging.

It was EXCEL. I can’t think of any other words.

The first day I arrived, the leaders helped me unpack my stuff. They did this for everyone; a complete stranger carried my mini-fridge up four flights of stairs for me just because I joined an organization that they love. After we broke into our Small Groups I made fast, easy friends and then, when we interacted with other groups I made more fast, easy friends.

Day two we went to a place called Valley View Baptist Church to do a ropes course called Faith Walk. Our leaders and the facilitators challenged us to complete obstacles that we’d previously thought we couldn’t. I, personally, am terrified of both heights and climbing, but with the encouragement of my leaders and fellow Cohorts I found the courage to scale a twenty-foot pole (on a harness, of course) and walk across a single cable with only a rope on either side for handholds and balance.

About halfway across this ‘bridge’ (a term I’ll use very loosely, as it generally implies some sort of structure) I started to panic. I was shaking and terrified and all I could think was, “What the hell am I doing up here?!” I hesitated, and then I asked my facilitator to lower me down. Instead of doing so, he asked me, “Why don’t you just take one more step?”

In the time it took for me to take that one step, my leaders and Cohorts noticed that I was hesitating. They noticed that I was scared. And they encouraged me. They shouted my name, they whooped, they clapped. They told me I could do it, and I did. I made it all the way across the bridge and was lowered to the ground with an enormous smile on my face.

And that smile stayed in place for the rest of the week. On day three we did community service, and I, along with thirty or so of my Cohorts, cleaned up the Muskingum River. The day after that we played simulation games and acted through scenarios designed to teach us lessons about the world and to challenge the ways we think, feel, and perceive our environments.

We faced obstacles in these games and scenarios. We faced hardships. There were games that were intensely difficult, games that were filled with distractions and detractions, and even games that were designed to be impossible to win. We learned how to deal with unfairness, with injustice. We learned how to block out the things that don’t matter and focus on the things that do. We learned how to make the hardest of decisions and how to do so in a way that won’t leave a bitter taste in our mouths.

We learned how to accept defeat, and how to acknowledge that there are things even we, as leaders and scholars and driven individuals, cannot accomplish.

This workshop, seminar, retreat, whatever you want to call it has given me so much. It taught me to be comfortable in my own skin and to accept all of my quirks and my flaws. It taught me that you don’t have to be 100% sure of yourself to lead. It taught me that it’s okay to be scared and it’s okay to be nervous, but that it’s also okay to open up and dispel those fears, those nerves, because there are people in the world who will appreciate you for doing it.

If anyone from Cohort 26 ever reads this post, I want to tell you thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

For everyone else reading this post, I want to say I hope you find the happiness and the self-confidence and the peace of mind that I found this past week.

words unsaid today.

I miss you.

I love you. I know I don't say it enough.

I hate talking to you. I hate the sound of your voice. I hate that I can think I'm so strong, so in control, so finally sound in my understanding of myself, and you can say one word to me and tear it all to shreds.

Nobody else on the planet calls me 'honey' except you. You were laughing when you said it, chiding, teasing, and I was almost crying because it's been so long since I've heard it.

I almost called you on Valentine's Day. Everyone was talking about candy and flowers and Valentines, and I was remembering a day when I was young, sitting on the floor in the living room while you cooked my dinner, me asking you what you got Sissy for Valentine's Day and you answering that she wasn't your Valentine, I was, and that I always would be, because nobody could ever love me as much as you do.

I was really, really angry when I left you. I told people I hated you. I don't; I never could. It's just so hard, sometimes, to make myself understand that you never hurt me on purpose. I know you didn't mean to. I know you don't even realize that you did it. I don't blame you anymore.

I don't know if I'll ever be able to forgive you completely. I want to, but I have too much of you in me; I'm too stubborn, too quick to anger and too good at holding grudges.

I just don't understand why I was never enough. I don't understand why you needed something else, why the knowledge that you were pushing me away and that you could lose me wasn't proper motivation to make you stop.

When I think about my future, the first thing that comes to mind is this horrible fear that my kids aren't going to have a Grandpa.

Nobody else can make me feel as childish and small as you can. Nobody else can make me five years old again with a single word, or a sigh, or a laugh.

I don't have any idea how to interact with you. Or how to think about you. Or how to feel about you.

I miss you.

I love you. I know, I don't say it enough.

Here's a line I've had running through my head all day; it hit me while I was driving, and I was so absorbed by it that I accidentally ran a red light.

"And the girl thought to herself that those around her might never truly see her as she saw herself, but that this was not, as a whole, a negative thing; for while the world would never understand the girl, the girl -- in all of her starry-eyed, wanderlusting dreaming, her head lost among the clouds and her feet lost upon the earth -- would, in return, never wholly understand the world."

It has potential, I'll give it that.

yet another memoir, this time about changes.

Today we're supposed to blog about a life- or perspective-changing experience: something that altered what we knew about the world, or how we looked at it. Alaska was telling us about some of his big experiences, and he raised a point that really interested me: knowing versus experiencing.

You can know that there are certain things in the world, or that things are a certain way, but that doesn't necessarily mean you've experienced them. I think the point of this memoir activity is for us to talk about a situation where we experienced something that we already knew... so here we go.

My mother passed away when I was four years old, so I've known from a very young age that bad things happen, people get hurt, and sometimes they even die. But, like Alaska said, there's a big difference between knowing something and experiencing it. I knew from the moment I woke up and saw an ambulance in my front yard that people did actually die -- even people I loved more than anything else in the world -- but I didn't know until I was eight years old that I could die, too.

A big part of my family is made up of farmers. My uncles Mike, Bobby, and Bo are all part of a farming co-op, as are my cousins Tommy and Brandon and Brett. I've spent a whole lot of time at my Aunt Carol's battered old house and inside the ancient rust-colored barn, and it was there that I faced the big, looming, terrifying shadow of the idea of death for the first time.

It was afternoon, almost supper time, and Brett, Tommy, and I had climbed up into the hayloft. We liked to play games up there, swinging around on the rope that hung from the ceiling and jumping over the square feed holes cut into the floor. Sometimes, when there was enough hay down on the lower level, Uncle Mike and Uncle Bo would pile it all up and let us jump down into it. That's what we wanted to do that day.

(We didn't have permission to play our little jumping game, but we hadn't been expressly told not to play it, either. I guess the adults just assumed that we were smart enough to know that it's a bad idea to jump out of a second-story loft onto hard-packed earth without anyone over the age of ten around to supervise, and in that assumption they were wrong, because that's exactly what we did.)

There was some hay down there, not a lot, but enough to fool us into thinking it was safe. Tommy went first, which was typical for him, and landed right in the middle with a soft, crackly poof sound, perfectly safe and sound. Once he'd scrambled out of the way Brett followed, and again, it was perfectly fine. The middle of the pile flattened out a little under his weight, and a good bit of the hay dragged out behind him or stuck to his clothes when he rolled away, but he and Tommy declared that it was my turn and, trusting that they wouldn't tell me to jump if they didn't think it was okay, I took it.

I remember to this day how I took exactly ten steps back, the way Tommy always did, and how I pushed out with my back foot as it left the wooden floor of the loft. I went up and out at a pretty gradual angle--and then down, down, plummetting, rocket-fast, straight towards the ground.

The hay wasn't as thick or fluffy or safe for me as it had been for my cousins, and when I hit it -- hard -- it completely flattened, whooshing away from me, so I landed flat on my back with barely two inches of padding between me and the ground.

The first thing I registered was that it hurt, and the second thing was that, when I tried to suck in air and scream for my uncles, I couldn't. It was Tommy who fled, wailing at the top of his lungs, to the house and dragged his dad back by the hand. It was Brett who babbled through his tears what had happened.

It was me who lay on the ground, gasping, barely able to breathe and, because I couldn't even muster up enough breath to sob, unable to cry. I don't remember how long I stayed there like that. It felt like an eternity, but in reality it could have been as little as two minutes. I thought I was dying, but in truth I'd just had the wind knocked out of me.

When I finally got up, my Uncle Mike swept me into a hug and told me to never, ever do something like that again. Just like he had so many times before, he warned me that doing dangerous things could very well result in me getting hurt.

For the first time ever, I believed him.

snapshot memory: a night at the beach.

The ocean is louder than anything I’ve ever heard before, roaring and crashing in a way that I didn’t think was possible. I’ve read about this, about how to sound of the waves can literally obliterate everything else. I’ve never believed that it’s true, that it can really happen—but it is. The sound of it surrounds me, blocks out the rest of the world as I stand with my feet planted in the soft white sand and the wind whipping against my clothes, and I think that this is the most peaceful I’ve ever felt.

The beach umbrella is heavy in my arms, the metal rod cool against the palms of my hands. I can feel the myriad of dents and scratches that cover its surface; it is the topography of an entire planet shrunk down to fit on this five-foot-long pole, grounding me here and reminding me that this is, in fact, a real event.

He stands a few feet behind me, laughing – though I can’t hear it over the waves – and waving me forward, toward the ocean. The moonlight hits the metal clasp of the necklace he wears, throwing silver in my face, reflecting out of his dark eyes. I hesitate, unsure, and he raises his voice so I can hear him over the cacophony of the waves.

“Do it!” he shouts. He’s smiling, wide and blazing and confident in me, and it makes me smile, too. “C’mon!”

I heft the umbrella up so it’s level with my ribs and yell back, “But it’s not ours!”

His response is thunderous and simple: “WHO CARES?”

I don’t know what it is – the giddiness of the day, the unbelievable beauty of the ocean, or just the surreal haze that covers this whole night – but something breaks the last remainders of my conscience and suddenly I don’t care about rules or consequences or right and wrong.

I lift the umbrella to my shoulder, holding it in both hands, my grip wide, like some kind of medieval warrior holds and spear, and I rush forward. The sand clutches at my feet and the wind threatens to knock me over, and when I hit the water it splashes up all around me, even louder here than it was ten feet away on the beach. I run forward, struggling against the waves, until my shorts are soaked through and the water is lapping at the hem of my t-shirt and then I stop, draw a deep breath, and hurl the umbrella forward with all of my strength.

It doesn’t go far, or straight, and it’s definitely not the kind of throw a medieval warrior would execute, but when the umbrella hits the water with an almighty splash, and I’m hit full in the face with the smell of salt and ocean and life, I’m thrilled. I literally squeal with excitement as I swing around, back to the beach, and there he is, doubled over now, laughing so hard his eyes are squeezed shut.

I fight my way back to the sand and kick a giant cloud of it in his direction, and he shouts, “Hey!”

“Catch me if you can!” I reply, and before he can even react I take off down the beach, running where the water and the shore meet, as fast as I can, arms pumping at my sides and air ripping through my chest. Every once in a while, when the waves ebb, I can hear his feet thumping against the ground behind me, or a snatch of his voice, laughing or shouting my name before the wind carries it away, and I keep running, laughing, shouting with absolute joy as the moon shines down on the best night of my summer.