Shiny, Happy Fits of Rage

I can attest to this. I’d spent so many days in denial of my isolation — “I don’t need anything, I don’t need anyone.” Independence was my only concern and given the chance, I’d have moved to Jupiter in a heartbeat — just to say I could, and I did, and to make the point, “I don’t need anything.”

You know, I lied to myself. As a freshman, sitting solitary in a room lit only by a small desk light and the glow of a computer screen and accepting my life for what it was. “This is how college is, ” I told myself. “This is what everyone does on Friday and Saturday nights.”

I was too naïve too envision otherwise. As far as I was concerned, the entire campus was simultaneously sitting at their computers each night, wondering what was going on in the world around them. My world was so vacant and my family, miles and miles away, was living under a rock, as far as I was concerned. I dreaded coming home and facing the countless inevitable interviews with friends and family about a future I knew (and still know) nothing about.

“So, how’s school going?”

“Oh, you know. It’s…going.”

“Yeah? You like it?”

“It has it’s days.”

Pause.

“What are you studying?”

“I don’t know. Life?”

“Oh.”

Pause.

Thus went every conversation, and with each question I grew increasingly discouraged as the realization that I really don’t have a whole lot of direction at the moment socked me in the stomach. Hard.

“OUCH!”

And yet, being surrounded by these people truly completes me. They’ve been there for me for a good 20 years now, and love me despite my bad driving record, among other flaws. I, in turn, have come to accept the accusations of being the mailman’s child and take comfort in knowing that I wasn’t the only sister cursed with rapidly growing hair on my legs (TMI).

I always brushed my family off as just another thing in my life that I could move to my own little planet without and not realize their absence. That’s not true. I’d bring them with! I’d bring them all with, so I could enjoy my mom’s cooking, my dad’s unintentional humor, and my sisters reminders that I am, in fact, weird — and that’s completely okay. 

It feels so good to be with family, to be here, to be outside of the 14 foot box of depression I call my residence, or the 2-mile radius of a monotonous campus. This visit home was like oxygen to me, a surge to my well-being. 

I have it here, for now, until tomorrow.