Some Other Beginning's End
Fifteen years since High School graduation, but the adventure's just getting started.
Let me spell ‘beginning’ right this time.
Fifteen years ago today, I posted a note on my Facebook page called “The Final Days Part Five: A New Begining” and I leave the typo in place because damn if it doesn’t add a little bit of hilarity. It’s proof that while I’ve always been a writer, I’ve never been even close to perfect. It’s a reminder that even when I am waxing my most poetic, I still fuck up, often, and in front of everyone. There’s something a little endearing about that.
But typos are not the reason I write today. I write today for the same reason I wrote when I was 18. Because I don’t know who I am without it. Because there is nothing I love more in this universe than how words can connect us across time and space, both to who we are/were/will be, but also to those around us. I still write because it is still how I make sense of the world.
Fifteen years. At 33, that’s just under half my life ago. Then, I went by a different name, had yet to figure out my gender or sexuality (or much at all of my identity really), and most significantly, I was busy experiencing what I didn’t know then were the final weeks of my mother’s life. Talk about whiplash to go from overly excited teenager, brimming with hope for the future, to broken and traumatized shell of a person who would spend the next decade (and then some) trying to pick up those pieces of themself when they had no idea how, or if ever, those pieces would fit back together.
I look at myself now though, patchwork quilt of a human that I’ve become, and for maybe the first time in my entire life, I can say with confidence, I’m good with who I am. Is every day a great one? Fuck no. Am I perfect? Still never. Am I exactly where I want to be in all the areas of my life? Not by a country mile. But I live with my longest friend, someone who knows me probably better than any other living person still in my life. I am actively pursuing my dreams by writing book after book, and not allowing rejections from authors or agents or programs stop me from putting my words into the world. I have a cute cat, unbelievable friends, a loving girlfriend, and more hope than I’ve ever had that there are still brighter days ahead of me. I’m in the planning stages for a several month long book tour that will be taking place in the later half of next year. I’m just really, truly content.
But I also can’t help but spend today thinking about all the friends I mentioned in that original note all those years ago—those folks who I spent every day with for four years (or more) and who I was so afraid I’d never see again. As it turns out, in the case of most of them, that was true. Some of those people probably don’t even remember me, or if they do, I am some different person with a different name in another lifetime. They don’t know who I became, and truth is, I don’t know who they did either.
It’s so hard to truly know someone from what we see on social media, but from what I’ve witnessed, we’ve been one hell of a class. We would go on to staff the White House and walk across the country speaking against human trafficking. We would become partners and parents and artists, creating families and lives for ourselves that our teenage iterations couldn’t even fathom possible. We’d survive the unprecedented way more than anyone should in a single lifetime, outliving global crisis after crisis and still somehow being able to make memes about it. Most tragically, some of us aren’t even here anymore.
We live in a different world now, one changed by forces so far beyond whatever control we felt we had over our lives when we walked out of Norristown Area High School as students for the last time. Life would go on to teach us more lessons than any classroom could, and no amount of support from those who knew us then could possibly have prepared us for that reality. We were promised the world if we finished high school, went to college, got a job, got married, had kids, lived happily ever after. We were promised a life no one could give us.
Yet we built lives anyway.
We christened our daughters and shared our coming out stories. We wrote sad poems of our heartbreaks and celebrated our weddings. We danced on national stages, were pundits on CNN, and published books even when people told us “no”. We were us, unapologetically, and that’s the most Norristown thing we could be.
And the best part? Even fifteen years later, we’re still just getting started.
Happy graduation anniversary to the class of 2009, wherever in life y’all are. I hope you’ve found some of, and continue to find, whatever joy in this life you’re looking for.