288. stardust

tunnel*tap tap tap* Is this thing still on? Anyone out there?

I am currently stuck in the Tampa International airport, the clock just turned 3am, and I have been up for nearly 21 hours, with another two hours or so until anything opens here, so now seems a good a time as any to get back into the habit of updating this site… if only to keep myself awake.

Not that I don’t miss putting my thoughts out into the void for you.

A lot has changed in the 139 days since I last posted—on September 1. Probably the biggest development is that I am finally, finally done with graduate school… which means that I finally, finally have a master’s degree! 139 days ago, I was just beginning the final semester of my library science degree.

All things considered, it went splendidly. Even though I was taking only one class, there were quite a few stressful moments and meltdowns, part of which had to do with the statistics and technical nature of the course content. But I got to the end in one piece.

And I graduated.

I actually received one of my program’s outstanding student awards this year, along with another good friend of mine, which was a great feeling, especially when I sometimes felt that I wasn’t as accomplished or as remarkable as some of my other classmates.

I was also nominated by one of my professors and selected by a university committee to be the graduate student commencement speaker for the December graduation ceremony. It was amazing and intense, and deeply humbling to address my peers with a charge for what I feel our world needs from graduate students and graduate education. I didn’t want to give some pat talk about following dreams or living up to full potential.

My talk centered around the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, or the restoration of the world.

Three of the key values of my university that are woven throughout all the programs and courses are social justice, diversity, and integrity. Essentially, I encouraged my fellow graduates to view their chosen careers through the lens of those values and look for opportunities in seemingly everyday moments to help heal the brokenness of the world.

That was nearly a month ago now.


While it was certainly a good feeling to be done with school after almost three years, the months leading up to it were tinged with a growing sense of anxiety and worry.

Sure, I was worried about finding a full-time job and how the actual fuck I was going to eventually pay off the tens of thousands of dollars worth of loans I had to take out to pursue a degree that is a basic requirement for virtually all librarian jobs. I worry that the number of MLIS graduates is increasing but that the number of new jobs is not growing at the same pace.

On a more fundamental level, I was worried about losing the close sense of community that I have been a part of for three years. For the most part, my social circle tends to be built around the activities that I am involved with or the people with whom I live. When those activities end or I move house, those social ties tend to dry up for me.

It’s not that I am necessarily edged out or excluded. It’s that I don’t really know how to connect with people. The ironic thing is that human community is something I do want and am often desperate for, but the mechanisms for doing that are unknown to me.

I did not grow up around many people. With the exception of church, Sunday school, and AWANAS, until age ten or eleven, my world consisted largely of my parents and my sisters. Since my family homeschooled, and we lived in a rural area, we never learned to interact with our peers. We weren’t forced to figure out the rules of the playground or the nuances of the school hallway, navigate friendships or weather rivalries.

While not every childhood experience is the same, some of those fundamental lessons about human nature take place during those early middle school years.

For instance, I never learned properly how to play. Play is important for the development of self-regulation, creative problem solving, along with the cerebral cortex. In our family though, play often took the form of psychological warfare. There were moments of fun, but through this, my sisters and I first learned to view human relationships through the paradigm of a threat. Our parents unwittingly taught us that we weren’t worthy of love and acceptance and that these commodities were conditional.

I find myself with a graduate degree and nearly 35, but that I have no idea who I really am apart from external measures of my self-worth—what other people tell me about myself. But I will always have those early voices and memories of my childhood in the catacombs of my subconscious.

My mom turning to me when I was about 15 or 16 during a verbal clash to actually say: “If people knew who you really are, they wouldn’t like you.”

I learned to fear other people, to keep them at a safe and comfortable distance, popping in and out of their reality when needed. While I noted that people liked me and wanted to be around me, I was suspicious and wary, like a wounded animal.

What were their true motives? When would they figure out I was hollow? When would they discover I was Frankenstein’s monster?


The intersection of all this lies in the fear that I will never have a family and a partner of my own—someone who accepts me in spite of my craziness and insecurity, and who is willing to fight the demons with me, but not treat me as the enemy.

I fear I’ll unconsciously push everyone good for me away—that my parents were too good of teachers in the art of toxic, fearful relationships.

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