Hello blog, and happy Wednesday!
Even more importantly, happy December!
December is my absolute favorite time of the year. I’m a little bit Christmas-obsessed, and it’s totally my Grandma Terry’s fault: my birthday is December 20th, and when I was younger I would always go spend the weekend with her to celebrate my birthday. In elementary school I usually went up during December and we’d go see the Nutcracker or ride the Polar Express or just sit by her Christmas tree and drink hot chocolate, and when I got older I started coming over on Thanksgiving night to spend the rest of the holiday weekend setting up the tree and watching Hallmark movies together. I love going through the ornaments and finding things my dad made when he was a little boy, eating sesame chicken from the Ames Hy-Vee– real Midwesterners will know that Hy-Vee Chinese tastes different at every store– and waiting until the sun sets on Black Friday to leave the house for the first time that day and stand on the sidewalk in our socks looking at the light from the Christmas tree through the window.
Our Thanksgiving weekend plans have been on hold for the past two years; last year the COVID situation was really bad in Iowa over Thanksgiving, especially in my hometown, and I wasn’t able to go home for the holiday, and this year I was only home for a couple of days so I spent it back home in Marion and she came to us to celebrate Thanksgiving, so I still got to see her while I was home. We’ve rescheduled our birthday visits for January, when I’ll be home for a longer chunk of time. Still, there’s no doubt in my mind where I’ll be on Black Friday in November 2024, my first Thanksgiving after graduating from Wellesley; Story City, Iowa, helping Grandma Terry detangle Christmas lights in her living room.
Over break, I thought a lot about the way things have changed since I went to college. When my dad dropped me off back in August 2020, I cried as hard as I ever have in my entire life. I felt like it was an ending, not a beginning; I felt like my entire life up to that point was all ending and I hadn’t had time to say goodbye. At the time, I was completely set on living Outside of Iowa after college, no matter what that meant, and watching my dad drive away I felt like the last moment I would really be able to call Iowa home. I spent the next five days quarantined in a hotel crying over whether I was still an Iowan now that I had betrayed my great state by leaving, and wondering if I would ever find somewhere that felt like home ever again.
Now about a year and a half into my Wellesley experience, I think I can safely say that I was being a little dramatic during those first couple days in Massachusetts. I had somehow gotten it into my head that once I left Iowa, I wasn’t ever able to go back, that there was no way I could spend four years in Massachusetts and then move back to the Midwest. It was a pretty big relief when I figured out that that was not the case, and that if I was crying so hard about leaving 56,000 square miles of land, that was probably a patch of land that was pretty important to me, and there were probably quite a few people on that patch of land who meant a great deal to me, and maybe there was something about loving a patch of land that much that meant something a little more than I thought it did. I thought everyone loved their homes just as much as I loved mine; everyone I met at Wellesley knew I was from Iowa, because it was all I ever talked about. I love my friends at Wellesley so much, but I dread the end of every break, because it always means I have to leave Iowa to go back to Massachusetts.
This has spiralled a little bit more into a rambling love letter to Iowa than I meant it to, so let me get things back on track: I love Iowa, and when I left for college, I thought that that was the end of us. I thought I had to move away and become a completely different person and “grow out” of everything I had every loved back home and I’d graduate from Wellesley thinking everything about my family’s lives was small potatoes and I’d never be able to love my home the same way ever again, because I’d start looking down on it. This is not what happened at all, and I think I should have had a lot more faith in myself. Sure, there are some people here who think life in Iowa is insignificant and that we all sit seventy miles apart on front porch rocking chairs staring at dead cornfields wishing we had cut off all ties to our families and run away to Vermont, but I have not become one of them. I arrived at Wellesley thinking I couldn’t go home; I wanted to go out into the world and help people, but not the people back home because we weren’t the People Who Mattered. I thought that maybe if I went out to help the People Who Mattered, I could become one of the People Who Mattered, and then by extension everyone I cared about would become People Who Also Mattered and the world would care about us and everyone would know when we were dying of COVID or being flattened by a natural disaster we’d never heard of because we Mattered. There’s a lot of classism hidden in the way that we talk about rural communities in the United States, and I had internalized a lot of that.
What I have come to learn is that I’m not going to change in the ways I thought I would, because making a Bostonian out of an Iowan isn’t the natural evolution I thought it would be. I thought that there was something lesser about the place that I was from and the person I was and the people I loved that a place like Wellesley would fix for me; I thought that everything I was was wrong and that I had to give up everything I loved to become right. I thought that first step onto campus was the end of my Iowa Stubborn, my Iowa Nice, my Iowa Pride, me.
This has been wildly untrue.
I don’t think I’ve changed one bit since coming to college. In fact, I think that if anything I’ve become more myself. I’m more honest with myself. I smile more. I laugh more. I make decisions and I think about things and I let myself be upset about things and I tell people about it. I tell people everything. I tell my friends that I love them and I send them things that make me think of them and I remember their favorite songs and the things they tell me when we’re walking to the grocery store. I make friends everywhere. I wave at the people in my classes every time I see them around campus, even if they never wave back. I make things, and I write things and I remember things and I believe myself when I say I remember them. I let myself be happy and I let myself be sad and if I want to cry over something stupid then I let myself cry. I take action. I help people. I do a lot of things, and I could keep going but then I’d be worried none of you would finish reading this blog post.
What I’m trying to say is that college isn’t the end. I would argue that it isn’t the end of anything, but that probably isn’t a universal truth and I’m sure lots of people would argue that lots of things have ended for them since coming to college. Regardless, college is not the end of your childhood. When things are different, that doesn’t mean that they’re over, and moving away from home doesn’t mean that you’re never coming back. For me, college is a pause; it’s a brief four year interruption from our regular programming, and during that pause I’m going to learn a lot about myself and maybe be a little difficult to recognize for the people who don’t see everything that happens inside of my brain, but when these four years are over I’m going to go back to Iowa and I’m going to live there and I’m going to be the same person I was when I left. I’ll be a little bit inverted; there are a lot of things that have only ever existed inside of this body that now have a home on the outside, but they’ve always been a part of me. I’m not changing or becoming or adapting or transforming or anything else like that. I am the exact same person I always have been, just a little more honestly.
I’m going to be honest; this is actually not the blog post I set out to write this morning, but I am glad that I wrote it. I think some of my best work on this blog has been my rambles about self-discovery.
My friend Emma and I are both going to be on campus until the 23rd, so last night we made lots of Christmas plans to keep us occupied until then. Tomorrow night we’re going to see the tree-lighting in Boston Commons, so expect lots of pictures in next week’s post.
Sending you joy,
Andrew
P.S. The header image is my family at our twenty-five person Thanksgiving! It was even more fun than it sounds.
P.P.S. “No, it’s Iowa.”