Only if they Love the You that is most Important to You

It gets harder with every year, sophomore, junior, then senior. One of the few aspects of college life that is more difficult to witness yet more beautiful with every year. The freshmen pour in. Eclectic fashion, astounding energy, the hope of millions channeled inside each individual one, the kind of vigor that shines like the rising sun in mid-July, stunning expectation, anxious physicality, anticipation long forgotten and the kind of fear that you only recognize at the beginning of each Fall semester. It’s that fear that reminds you of how dull your light now is in comparison to back when you were them.  The kind of fear that is just waiting to be opened up and operated on, changed, re-arranged, unlearned, created and re-created. The kind of fear you miss knowing as your own intimate confidant. You allow envy to linger and make your best effort at rekindling memories from your distant observations. You delight in a vulnerability that seems to be jumping up and down, dancing and banging on the doors of downtown Richmond, on the edge of its seat waiting for the call of the beginning of the rest of their lives. To know the unknown and to finally be known for what it is. College! The place they escaped to under the presumption that this was the place to bring yourself, be yourself, become yourself. The place where they will acquire ambitions, beliefs, experiences, friends and knowledge that will surreptitiously give the finger to everything at home they came to escape. The immersion of varying opinions and things known to them as taboo will come to create a rebellious persona that can only be enacted through the bonded result of this pledge made with their fellow freshman to be new and curious. They travel in packs and can be identified as coy, brave in a quest to prove memorable, obnoxious, or important. They are innocent seekers.  

Many come with significant others. You look on with concern and a thriving joy inside yourself than no amount of cynicism could thieve from you. Together they possess a rare fragility displaying that passionate, all consuming, out of their minds, first time, I would eat my peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich off the bottom of his/her shoe 3 days walked on and savor it, run to the ends of the earth to make my point to finally give in just to feel all of it at one time, forgo all plans, hopes, dreams in the name of Jimmy/Susie kind of enamored devotion. They were dropped off by mom and dad and overnight became the people they are becoming. Naturally they conclude to make it eternal. Within this pact they promise to be together forever. They sit on the quad/Monroe Park on a towel and share Pizza Hut and Shafer soft serve.

You leave for your 9 a.m. wearing smeared makeup reeking of jaded annoyance that sums up all thoughts of your disappointment in Honey Boo Boo’s repugnant idea of spaghetti and your high electricity bill. You walk past the dorms; 8:50 a.m. He sits outside of Brandt and waits for her with big gleaming eyes begging for approval with Starbucks in hand and endearment in his heart. You would bet a million bucks that this kid would sit there for another 30 minutes waiting, that he would pick up the three morsels of the muffin she drops in class and dust them off if she asked him to. You want to tell them to suck it dry. You just want to walk right up to these two people that you technically know nothing about and say, hey guys, please, give it all you got because even when it does come down you just have to be able to say you gave it all you had. To be able to say that you wanted the last sip of milkshake and you let them have it at the prayer of a dirty, unexpected make out session mid-way through statistics in the window of her 15 minutes between classes up against that restaurant window filled with twenty on-lookers in the Fan with reckless abandonment.

You concede to yourself that they fight as if the fire of 6,000 suns is upon them and they’ve been told that the last mouth releasing a word is the one that won’t burn to death. Slowly but surely you observe their internal struggle for freedom come to challenge what they once knew as the most unbreakable alliance mankind had ever seen. You watch expectantly as they give the most dramatic, wholehearted portrayal of a country trying to overrule their struggle, oppression, and progression with the Constitution of their original pact. They remain products of the America today that knows nothing of a Constitution, little of who they are at age 17 and even less about commitment. Months later, they disappear. You know they still come to class but they aren’t together and he certainly isn’t waiting in the morning outside of Brandt. It is as if their presence ceases to take up space. Occasionally you glance around to find them, respectably singular beings. They are always dressed quite differently than you remember, a different demeanor, maybe hair color, way about who they now are.

Love like that is something that makes an appearance with the spectacular likelihood of a perfectly spaced, free parking spot in downtown Richmond or guessing the exact weight of your Sweet Frog cup. It transcends into other’s lives and tells the world that reveries are not to be martyred but lived. It shows us all that in placing your being within another you deceive your worth and knowingly ingrain in your destiny a counterfeit map. Love like that impels others to believe in the union of two people when they don’t believe in themselves. It knows no free man and vacuums up the aimlessly roaming dreamers to make captive. It is cruel and kind, wishful and selfish, silly and original in a world where the word in its intended form has become extinct. We know it to be fleeting and relentless with the fury of a breaching stage 4 hurricane. Love like this gives birth to a hate stronger than we have or will ever know. You can only hate as much as you have ever loved. This piece of life's pie is injected with an expiration date proceeding with purpose and a poison that’ll keep you down and out for much longer than a few days. Whilst wading in the loathing of the one you once called yours, evolution’s light creeps into your window sill. The light gives growth to the hate so thoroughly harvested sprouting maturity. The mind becomes entwined with the rest of humanity’s. We begin a lifelong courtship with those around us. Our imaginations are bigger and broader, but not with creativity, but realizations of pain so many carry. Empathy overwhelms us.

One can find love without ever having known this specific flavor of it. Most don’t but all things are possible. We give ourselves over into another’s identity hoping theirs be strong enough to allot meaning to ours. One of two ways it ends. Either so weak both break or one so strong that it overcomes the other through consumption in pursuit of addiction to the power. In this lesson, we learn that real love is not a tug of war between wills but a generous offering, equal efforts volunteered toward succumbing, subduing, or extending your will to meet your counterpart.

What if I said that romance is finding that person that loves the you that you love the most. Well I would sort of be channeling the sentiments of Carrie Bradshaw at the end of the Paris episode. That one is my fave. But think about it, really. There’s something about the thought of that… something fresh, something predestined to it, something that makes your arm hair stand up. It takes your mind down that back road you grew up riding in your best friend’s PT Loser (Cruiser) for forever and forever. It broadens your perception of the world around you and pulls out a beckoning, earnest, happiness from your very core, or maybe stark madness. I love the word madness. No matter where you are, who you’re with, what you’re doing, you often think, no one sees this one thing that’s inside me just waiting to be woken up. Why?

What if someone did and they fell in love with that…. That would be everything, change everything. We spend our whole lives walking down this path. It’s all our own. Many of us end up taking side, alternative, sporadically chosen routes. We culminate experience and good faith to truck on. The gps of our subconscious is screaming and warning us in that British accent (no, that’s just mine) and from time to time we feel a little tug from it. We become quiet enough internally to hear the buzzing for a moment. It jolts us, get those endorphins going and we get off a little bit on the thrill of taking the alternative route for the adventure. We do this in order to explore, pick up and drop off the varied remnants of ourselves that we never knew pieced together our identity. Eventually we come to our own peace, our consensus. We hit a pinnacle; a death, abandonment, lost friendship, breakup, a fork in the road and we make a decisive decision. The acceptance of the I am “insert random culmination of unique traits” and I will not waver. I will seek and open my mind to newfound knowledge, traits, and changes but this is the base of who I was built to be.

Are you the silliest, quirkiest, most optimistic person you know? Are you one of the most loving, or generous, or unique people you know? Is doing little anonymous acts of kindness your thing? Does no one give a compliment quite like you? If one of your friends wanted to dare someone to jump up on the cafeteria table and announce in front of 200 students that it was them who pulled the fire alarm twice that morning, Would you be the one most likely to do it? Are you ridiculously convicted in your belief that the world would be a way better place if we all cuddled with a fluffy Persian or stray behind the back of KFC every single day? Do you ask the best questions ever? Are you secretly brilliant but everyone takes you for Kim Kardashian? Are you a hidden comedian that no one will accept in response to your immaculate GPA and endless leadership titles?

You’ll know it when you see it. When you find those special details about yourself that you hold most beloved, demand that it be loved with shameless, brazen courage and exuberance. It sounds simple enough in theory. Why even talk about it? I all too often see young couples today try to subdue or control some part of their significant other. Don’t be subdued, but renewed to whoever you are. The right person will love about you what most people don’t appreciate or perceive in the shallow confines of society. That doesn’t mean that tomorrow I should wake up and decide that I am the biggest genius man will ever know and I must win all arguments. These characteristics must define love and be easily lendable to the harmony of a union. Who you are isn’t a choice but a state. Before you can find your person, I think, you have to know yourself. Once you know yourself you have to prioritize your character. The person that falls effortlessly in love with it just as much as everything else that comes with you….. that’s your person.  

Questions Acknowledge Humanity

Today I write to you about myself. Keep in mind, regardless of my last two blog postings I will never be someone who plans on telling you how to think or live your life. Telling you about mine hopefully rings a better tune in your ear and can still accomplish positive resonation.

I just had lunch with a really good friend following one of our classes together. In this class I asked our professor a question about our classroom. This was not a question that this teacher took lightly because he assumed that in regards to my question I wasn’t taking the environment or his authority seriously. Rest assured that although I am remaining exceptionally vague out of respect for these people and this encounter I did not ask what one would refer to as a “dumb question.” To echo this sentiment I do have great respect for said professor and didn’t quite understand his push back at me, especially so blatant and in front of the rest of the class. Another professor asked me to stay after to discuss the issue. This teacher apologized for some of the other teacher’s response to me then asked me to question the reasoning behind my inquisitiveness.

Following this altercation my friend informed me that the question I had asked was on her and other’s minds as well. We began to discuss it. “That seems to be something that really bothers you,” she says, “When people in authority that are hungry for power aren’t willing to accept other’s views.” Apparently she can read me pretty well. She goes on to tell me that I am always asking questions. I am completely aware of this. This day in age people have a hard time understanding and accepting that about me. This is exceptionally difficult to get a grasp on. When I meet someone I want to immediately know them. I want to really know them. If the world was mine and all of the people like me the word “really” that I used in the previous sentence would not be necessary. To me, to know someone is to understand them. Without an account of one’s past, present, future wishes, beliefs, feelings, thoughts and opinions you are unable to understand people. My definition of knowing someone is the closest one can get to walking a day in their shoes.

Questions that I deem completely appropriate on a first encounter basis are questions that scare people. I notice that when I meet people I lean into them and take a genuine, intimate (again, a word I don’t feel like I need to use but this world belongs to tons of people that aren’t like me) interest in who they are, where they come from and why they are the way they are. I observe many, if not 90 percent of these people curl into themselves, become anxiety ridden and look for the nearest exit. Sometimes I jokingly state that I am allergic to small talk. In fact, there is nothing joking to this statement. A huge part of this is webbed into my making. Having become a part of my persona I have accepted it as an aspect of my nature that I have only found myself unsuccessful at taming.

                I remember feeling stifled as a child. There were things I wanted to know and felt keen on asking that other children could not answer nor wished to know. There were so many times that I would ask someone a question and my mother would tell me that it wasn’t appropriate. I remember thinking, what is going on? I love answering questions. I love when people ask me my opinion or what has gone on in my past or why I do or say or think things. I love it when people really want to know me. Why do they act as if I only wish to antagonize them? I only wish to understand these people and treat them with such knowledge in mind. As a child I knew that people did things in response to their life. People did bad things not because they were bad but because something awful had happened to them or they were left out or without a parent figure in their life.

                I wish to know people because I wish more than anything, to know the world. I wish to know other’s opinions and beliefs not because I am looking to challenge them but in my search to know humanity. I come from Wytheville Virginia. The diversity offered me throughout my formative years was few and far between. I wish to not taste but binge and gorge myself on helpings of all kinds of people of the world. I feel the need to know other’s views so that I can learn and entertain them myself.  This is not to say that I won’t challenge other’s thoughts or beliefs, but to say that I only hope to extend my knowledge. I also yearn to be challenged in my views. My greatest hope is to be accepted in my difference of opinion while simultaneously being questioned.

                My friend Sarah goes onto tell me, “I think that your questions come from a place of genuine curiosity but it intimidates people.” I’ve heard this many times in my life. Apparently I am intimidating. “You just bring so much out in people in conversation and that scares some people,” she says. My only response to this is that people should know who they are and own who they are. There is never ANYTHING to be ashamed of from your past…. That’s why they call it your past. It only created a new 2.0 version of you that is more capable, resilient and evolved. Others may not see it that way, but I do.

                I am an English major. Here’s the thing about English majors; our professors expect us to teach the class. We come into class, sit down, the professor briefs us on key points of the reading and what was happening in the world during the time period the literature was written, then he/she asks the most open ended question you think you may have ever heard in your life. The next day, it never fails; you realize that yesterday you were wrong. A few intellectual arms go up; they briefly and articulately state their claim and opinion and the professor looks at them with wonderment and goes into a spiel on why said student was correct. I have been lucky enough to know the singular opinions of two of my English professors. Les Harrison hails from Texas A & M via Miami University (the UVA of Ohio), where he’s from and he may as well have an opinion on angular versus linear plaid. This is his charm and the reasoning behind every English student’s love or hate reaction to the mention of his name. Nick Sharp is the most seasoned English professor at VCU and his passionate thoughts begin with Shakespeare and end with stories of “Back in the day…”

Open minded meets open ended. These are the people I have come to know and love in authority since leaving home to become an adult. They don’t hope to or even consider imposing anything but the notion that you can learn something from reading literature. They will inform us of the history, personal points to know, hand us the baton, maybe shoot that gun one more time, hop in the stands and yell for us to run! This is where respect is established. To be a free thinker is to be able to ask questions, to be able to share opinions and accept opinions.

I am fully aware that if I would back down, even slightly from my belief in truly knowing others, or, if I were to tone down my nature a few notches that life could possibly be easier for me. By easier I mean a more constant, breezy, ebb and flow of circulating nods, yeses, bits and pieces of appeasing, vapid compliments to outfits and tons of “friends.” But I don’t want a quantity of “friends” to do lunch with at Chick-fil-A. Don’t get me wrong, there are days that I can talk Mila and Ashton all day. However this type of conversation needs to be limited to a half of the circumference of a fully rounded conversation as oppose to the entirety of it. I want my 5 to 10 sincere, soul seeking, kindred spirited, down to earth, talk about anything and everything all the time no matter how long it takes, friends. I don’t want to be “liked.” I want to be loved, or unfortunately, hated for what people are immediately told of me from me. This week in a class we were reading Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”… don’t be afraid. If you haven’t read it, it’s good stuff. Anyway, my favorite line is “Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.” A base man, I come to find is a bad, scummy person. In Blake’s time this was a gypsy or a posing priest or a deviant criminal who felt compelled to haggle the innocent. Moral of the story; if you make known your convictions initially, they will not be questioned.

You shouldn’t be afraid of yourself or what that means. You shouldn’t be afraid of others or what they bring to the table. The quicker you are to embrace another, the quicker they are to embrace you. Questions bring life to life. Allowing others to know you should never be intimidating, but exciting. If they are hearing it from you then it must be the most true source and content offered. Why not find excitement in this kind of opportunity? Today is a day when you should refuse to allow the world to tell you or anyone else who you are. So "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." And you can’t go wrong with Dr. Seuss.