A Midsummer Night's Retrospective

Or how to roll with the punches

Over hill, over dale,

Thorough bush, thorough brier,

Over park, over pale,

Thorough flood, thorough fire;

I do wander everywhere,

Swifter than the moon’s sphere.

- A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.2-7, Willy Shakes

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It’s Friday, July 14th, 9:35pm on the dot as I’m writing this. Life has been a whirlwind ever since graduation. In the first week in June, I went to work at a summer camp as a rock climbing instructor for queer youth, a job that I was both ecstatic for and reliant on to make Greece happen. In the second week of June, I quit said job over safety concerns, and faced down the prospect of a summer unemployed, job searching, or even having to move back home, which was exactly the kind of ambiguity I wanted to avoid. 

Oh well. All I’ll say about the matter is that there was a lot of grief involved, and a lot of frantically applying to retail jobs and some long shots too. Cue the quiet humiliation of getting turned down by Costco, even though it was for understandable timing reasons, timing reasons that have since resolved. Ugh, whatever. Cue half-heartedly preparing for interviews because it’s good practice at least. Cue panic applying to other apartments because I got a cool job I didn’t think I would get! Oh my stars has it been busy. Plans upended, new ones drafted and dashed just as quickly, all punctuated by the creeping nausea of wondering how in the world am I going to pull this off? Then the chip on my shoulder kicks in quit asking your therapist and find a way.  

But amidst the post-undergrad-humanities major heights and pits, there’s been a lot of blessings too. I count them presently: 

1. Writing Braver

I find myself recovering (discovering?) a writing practice that’s starting to feel authentically mine. Outside of the breakneck crush of deadlines and external evaluation, I find myself making even bolder choices than I ever thought possible. Hopefully this means that I’m finally (finally!) learning to trust my instincts—and its corollary, knowing whose opinions are valuable to me while in the Writing Process. Most of it has been developmental editing for a series I started drafting in high school. By developmental editing, I mean gutting it like a shabby McMansion and turning it into something actually cohesive and unique, rather than a hodgepodge of architectural choices gesturing towards an empty something. It’s gonna be a Southern Gothic Alien Invasion, and I’m very excited for it. 

2. Reading Voraciously

My reading practice too has seemingly rebounded in ways that I haven’t seen since grade school. A lot of this is due to literally having all of the hours of my day at my disposal, but I don’t think I’ve actually consistently sat down and read for fun this intentionally in ages. I’m talking reading for hours by night-light buried under your covers stifling your gasps so you don’t wake your housemates kind of fun. 

Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs (who is, for the sake of transparency, a beloved mentor of mine) saw me through the week at summer camp swatting at mosquitoes and the aftermath of no longer being there. I figured that if Nicholas and Esther [SPOILERS REDACTED GO READ IT NERDS], I mean at the very least I could get off my ass and try to solve my own problems, ya know, like an adult. Truly a buoy in the chaotic seas of life. It was just a blast to read too, and exactly the kind of world-trotting fantasy I needed to kick me out of my post-college reading slump. I admit that I also appreciated the copious amounts and varied sources of blood. 

In a completely different vein, Tess of the D’Urbervilles by notably dead Thomas Hardy has conquered my waking moments. I read it during breakfast, lunch, on my front lawn. It’s eye-rollingly old-fashioned, vexingly contemporary, and utterly compelling all at once, devastatingly so. I don’t know that I can go around willy-nilly recommending it to random people given its premise and function as a social novel, but if you’re in a good space for it and you’re even just a wee bit curious what all the fuss is about, I would encourage you to give it a go. Besides, Hardy’s prose is the kind that makes writers (read: me) cry tears of jealousy, and the structure of his novels is nothing short of poetic. 

Other authors of note this past month and a half include Susanna Clarke, Patrick O’Brian, and Evie Dunmore, with more certainly to come.

3. More Time With Friends 

The extra time to connect with friends and mentors before the summer ends has got to be the best part of all, which I wouldn’t have gotten if I’d stayed at my previous job. I’m so grateful to have a second goodbye with everyone from college. These don’t happen often, so I’m trying to use it well to solidify bonds that will withstand the time and distance, bonds that I won’t feel sheepish about maintaining via the technological superhighway called the internet. I want to make an effort to keep in touch with the people who matter to me. It’s hard to put to words how much my friends are treasures to me; It’s a uniquely aro-ace feeling that not many people outside of that community have expressed curiosity about. To make a long story short, there are lots of ways that the world remains stubbornly traditional even as it gloats its progress, and for those complicated reasons, friendships are high stakes for me, often the only way for me to access a sense of community, and once you hit a certain age they become so much more difficult to maintain. Suffice it to say, I want to use this extra time to set myself up for success, and I’m thankful that I have this extra time at all. 

To Conclude…

Life bears on. I am practicing Greek with a homicidal green owl house on the torment nexus machine that we all keep in our back pockets. I survive on an ungodly amount of meal-prepped Chicken Alfredo because correctly deriving a Reasonable Human Amount of cooked food from uncooked food is deceptively difficult. I think if all goes according to the spaghetti on the wall, I will end up having moved three times in some capacity by the end of summer, so the days are hectic, but not without their good things. Eventually I will buy plane tickets for said trip to Greece. But that’s not a problem now. Not yet. I’ll solve it when it comes time to.