Life life life life life

It's become impossible to summarize.

I have two major reasons for not having slipped a new Hot and Disabled your way since the semester began: the first is unprecedented demand on my time, generally in ways I’m profoundly thankful for. My Modern Poetry class alone is a mind-breaking spirit-transforming mess of wonders, during which I end up writing my own entirely unplanned poems when I’m trying to take notes. Modernism might be the most fascinating period in artistic history, and when combined with the singular passion and mind-like-no-other talents of Professor Kerry Evans it’s….well, I’ll put it this way: When my boss at the Flannery O’Connor Review first met me and I started going on about that class, he said, “I was going to ask what program you’re in but there’s no need, you’re clearly a poet.”

No I’m not! But that motherfucker makes me into one. Twice a week. It is some serious full-on Dead Poet’s Society type-shit, y’all. And when his ideas splinter off into a dozen on-the-surface-unrelated directions and he says, genuinely, “What was I talking about?” his unconnected but fascinating questions are, without fail, repeated back to him in mesmerized communal echo. It’s somethin’ else.

The other reason why you haven’t had one of these shot at you from the canon that is my desk recently is because never in my life has my having a disability been less of a thing, less of a deal! In fact, the other day I thought it was and I was blissfully wrong. People are simply warmer and friendlier than I even understood. To wit:

I was walking up the hill to the Arts and Sciences building (where the entire course of my life undfolds) on yet another punishingly hot day. I kept pausing, thinking how is it so hot and how the fuck am I not already there. A blond undergrad girl said, “Would you like me to walk with you?” I immediately thought of all the invasive help I’ve been presumed to want (usually after some stranger gives it, and it often involves unwanted touch) over the years and said, “Why?” she said, “I was just wondering.” My tone colored by, again, years of assumptions of helplessness I said, “I’m not unsafe, just hot.” And she said, “Oh, no, I just figured maybe you were bored.”

Bored? Walking slowly up a hill in heat so intense it can affect your breathing? Well come to think of it I’m not very mentally stimulated right now! I apologized for my tone, but, in a region that doesn’t demonize emotion or elevate subdued non-expression, she didn’t even seem to notice. She told me it was fine, and I could tell she meant it. I said I was just frustrated and the heat was getting to me, but she didn’t seem to need an explanation. Then I said I’d be glad for company on the walk, and I found out she’s a Psych major going to a class on drugs and their effects. EVERY kind of drug, she said. They were focusing on cocaine right then, but she HADN’T known what Coca-cola used to be made from so I got to dispense that fact. And tell her tales of a bygone strange age, like the time Coca-Cola came to my Catholic school in New Orleans and did an elaborate multimedia presentation on why we shouldn’t do drugs. After the presentation, we were all given bottles of Coke. I hadn’t had a soda for 3 years and was bouncing off the walls so hard that the most hyperactive boys in my 8th grade class were annoyed with me. I seemed pretty drugged.

I work out as often as I possibly can at the palacial West Campus gym for free, and yesterday evening was more crowded than it’s ever been during my time there. (This could’ve been frustrating because a line of D00dz had monopolized the weights, but for reasons I need not go into here I’d had literally no sleep on Tuesday night and was not especially lift-ready anyway. No one wanted the ab-machine during the however-long that I needed it and the thoroughly divine indoor track that showcases a wide-windowed view of our magnificent campus always has room.)

Here’s what really hit me yesterday at the gym, when I had a larger critical mass to palpably prove this: everybody was having fun. The South is not a region that pressures anybody to work out (it could actually stand to do so at least a little given the prevalence of heart and blood pressure issues like my father had), so the vast majority of people who are there are there because they want to be. And yes, some of them have the proportions of Barbies and toning like Ken because YOUTH, but there’s definitely an array of body types represented; this is not a high-pressure gym. I miss my transformative personal trainer, without whom I never could have discovered my relationship to the gym, and I miss the sweet elderly ladies I used to sauna with, and I miss the sauna. (It appears that the Georgia climate assumes no use for a sauna.) But I don’t miss the weird social disconnect between “I see you at least twice a week and we acknowledge each other silently without saying a damn thing because this is California where you’re expected to bend over backwards to create a perfect physical appearance and sexy/enticing image to go with it and get everyone to notice you but God forbid this noticing leads to a CONVERSATION because being Intentionally On-Display and in pieces with social anxiety MAKES A LOT OF SENSE.”)

Wow I did not breathe during that little rant.

Exhale. Still processing a whole host of things. When you’re used to defending or explaining or writing whole essays inspired by people’s weird reactions to your body, you start to allocating the mental space to plan those essays, spit out those comebacks, hone and expand your arsenal. Here I am, suddenly, with no need to fight. And that’s an adjustment. Because battle feels like power, and having the need for battle so abruptly and wholly removed feels a lot like powerlessness. Powerlessness feels a lot like trauma. Which then feels a lot like hidden/unaddressed issues surging to the fore during your off-hours because you’ve got no external antagonists to detract from them.

O the thorny complexities of peace.

A representative piece of what my lit crit marginalia has become. O that my undergrad self knew to what undiscovered tiers of self-serious pretention I would rise. This, my friends, is living.