For The Swing Set Souls

If you shoved me in the DeLorean and Scrooge’d me into my ten-year-old self, I’m not so sure my side of the playground would be buzzing with activity.

Or swimming with sticky fingers from flavor ice pops. Crackling with sneakers scrubbing pavement.

I’m not so sure you’d run up to me with a jump rope and ask if I could hold one end.

“Please, oh please,” you wouldn’t have said. “We absolutely need your help. Come with me.”

More likely, you’d find me scraping my shoes against a pile of woodchips as I swung back and forth, back and forth, so close to those smiling faces and churning backward all the same.

That go-to interview question pops into my head: “What’s your biggest weakness.”

“Well, sir, you see it’s, um, kind of a funny story. Have you been to Home Depot lately?”

“What?”

“Home Depot, sir. You know those swing sets with striped overhangs and monkey bars? I’m kind of like a swing.”

“You are,” he might say.

Because I am sure that if it were a woman, she would already be pulling her wallet out of her purse and unfolding a photo gallery longer than my forearm. Pictures of her own children pushing each other at the neighborhood playground in her hands.

“A swing,” I’d say. “Yes. I’ve been waiting for too long now like one of those rusty swings cracking and weathered, hoping the store employee might brush his forehead with his orange apron pocket and drag me inside. Out of somebody else’s rainstorm. Away from the back of the pile. Into somebody’s backyard.”

He might not follow, but maybe he will. Maybe he had some swing days of his own, back on the playground, hands tucked inside overall pockets.

I am sort of hoping his childhood years weren’t categorized by foursquare games and knockout championships and getting presidential on the mile run in gym class. I am sort of hoping he got an X for that portion.

Because just like I learned to lace up my sneakers and round a 400-meter track four times, I am ready to stop sitting and pausing and shuffling and waiting and hoping and praying some swing set lover comes over to sit on me. Learning how to take Rooted In Place less metaphorically.

I hope the rest of you Swing Set Souls are, too.

Dear College Students, We Got Yo’ Back. Love, HUG Stronger

Here’s the deal: I’m not really sure how you change the world, if you haven’t figured that out yet. I want to say it’s a bit like reading every book, every memoir, every blog post in the universe on Believing In Something Small And Insignificant Until Its Large and Unavoidable.

But that sounds kind of daunting, kind of forceful, kind of not possible.

It’s safe to say I’ve been studying the ways we connect online for the last two years, begging my mind to come up with a project worth flinging out into the Internet.

I’d lie awake at night, wrestling with going to sleep or staying up for six hours typing away at some yet-to-be-written manifesto on some yet-to-be-identified topic.

I knew who I cared about and why.

The lonely college girls.

She holes up in her dorm room with bare walls beneath a lilac-colored duvet comforter. Embarrassed because she loves cheetah print slippers or raspberry ice cream that stains her lips the color of red nail polish. Ashamed she’s never had a real boyfriend, been on an honest-to-God date. Afraid she’ll spend these next four years ducking her head down, ear buds on the minute the professor says she can leave the classroom.

Sure she won’t know how to navigate between high school routine and real world chaos. Sure she doesn’t know where the line becomes gray.

I had a problem sitting back and not doing anything about that.

It’s the antsy girl in me.

And here is the part where I tell you what that antsy girl went and did, finally, to stop just saying something that sounded good and started acting out loud. She made a website.

HUG Stronger.

Helping Undergrads Grow Stronger.

I know I’m not going to find every single solitary college student and line them up and tell them something to make tomorrow a little less painful, but you better believe I’m going to try. Oh, how I am going to try.

And I’ve got an army of writers behind me, ready to take your tomorrow and turn it into something worth getting excited about.

We are acting out in defiance against the inevitable misery. Reluctance to cater to catty girls at apartment parties, persistence to push through depression and anxiety.

College calls us to create ourselves anew. To stand in place when the tide of peers pound against us or ignore us, backing far away the minute we choose our own paths.

HUG Stronger begins on Monday with the notion that you cannot know it all in these four years, but that it can’t hurt having a conversation with us and those who came before us and those who have yet to come. We are a community of confidantes, voices from all backgrounds and beliefs, and we’re learning from each other every day. Join us, will you?

—

Are you lonely, anxious, overwhelmed, depressed, unsettled, in a funk, feeling worrisome, unsure, panicky? Do you feel like a ping-pong ball inside an arcade machine? We are here for you.

And then you’re wondering if you’re going to end up in love forever or just for this week.

The first time I fell in love, I knew before he even approached my doorstep. I hadn’t seen him in ten days and still I ran down the basement stairs to my mother’s office and begged her to feel my forehead. Begged her to tell me if I was going to be sick.

That’s what falling in love felt like: an overwhelming nausea wrapped up inside my tiny body because I hadn’t eaten a real meal in ten days. I sat at Applebees and stared down at my chicken fingers and French fries. The only thing that looked edible on that plate was the ketchup.

He was in a third world country, tending to children in a hospital. And I was in suburban America, complaining to my best friend that the food was too greasy, my stomach too sensitive.

I did not fall in love in Applebees, though. I think that happened somewhere in the middle of the street outside his house, my fingertips wrapped around his ribcage, my best friend’s SUV circling the neighborhood so we could have five more minutes to say goodbye when we’d only just begun to say hello.

When you’re eighteen, you think it’s going to take a century to get to next week. And then it comes, sneaks up on you, and suddenly you’re sitting—no, perching—on your own family room couch arm because you’re afraid to sit next to the boy whose lips touched yours last month. You’re saying something stupid about a movie you grew to hate, a movie that, like your crazy mind, kept coming back to the beginning and starting over.

You’re not in control. You down about sixteen glasses of water both because you think you’re going through menopause and you can’t seem to shake the constant hunger pangs because it’s been weeks since you had a real meal.

And then you’re wondering if you’re going to end up in love forever or just for this week. You’re wondering how much of you you have to give for it to be enough for him. It starts feeling like a bargaining game, like you’ve set up a Monopoly board and you keep landing on his hotels and he keeps wiggling those beautiful fingers at you, waiting for you to fork over a couple hundred dollars to pay for what you didn’t even mean to do.

That’s love. That’s the reason you break up with him and feel bad about it two days later.

So bad you’re sitting in a diner for three hours—three hours?—wondering where you went wrong and suddenly you’re blaming your mother. Yes, your mother. You’re blaming your mother because it’s her fault you fell in love.

It’s the first time we ever said what we wanted to say, the last time we had a conversation that didn’t detour like those roundabouts in New Jersey. It’s a shame it came when we were only six percent through with our relationship. That other ninety-four percent didn’t feel great compared to that one Thursday afternoon.

I don’t think either of us ate dinner that night. I sat on my best friend’s treadmill for half an hour, stretching intervals to pull the taut runway with my feet instead of turning it on. He leaned against her pool table and pretended I didn’t exist.

And I didn’t. Not really.

That was the tip-off. Our healing began with a bodybuilder machine built like a winter sled, me playing around, pulling myself and my friend up, him watching us act absurd. It was like learning to flirt all over again.

And you know what?

I still haven’t figured it out.

But that’s OK. For some reason, that’s totally OK with me. Because I figure I’ll have just as much fun learning with whoever decides to give me my next stomachache.

[Photo credit]

Love Letter to the Lonely College Girl

Perhaps I’d be better off pulling up a chair at a crammed Starbucks on a Monday afternoon, seeking out the perfect girl to share her story. But instead, I’ll let her find me.

I’m going to start by ripping apart those renew subscription cards that come inside every beauty and housekeeping magazine.

Not because buying another pair of gardening shears is a particularly awful thing to do or because the first step to a dangerous dirt path to disaster is a weekend of healthy calisthenics, pumpkin-patch-picking style.

Really, those are tiny. Insignificant. Minor little voices sitting inside our already-clogged noggins that say to do more, be more, try more.

All the while, they want us to take less.

Less self-love. Less ice cream. Less free time. Less clutter. Less, less, less.

The world has told us that we are to fill ourselves up by pushing everything out—all the mess, the bad, the memories we don’t have room for anymore.

We make way for new ones in college, right?

New friends to love us in the here and now. New classes to fill our already-tight schedules. New jobs so we can pay the Dominoes delivery driver when he rat-a-tats on our door because we are so new, so filled, we have no time to cook Grandma’s favorite stew.

But we forget how much comfort we’ve sacrificed in doing that. We forget the coping mechanisms we discovered in high school—the healthy ones like ranting to a best friend at our locker before class or spending Friday night lapping the football stadium perimeter with a hot chocolate while boys in mud-stained spandex fumble the ball for the third time.

Those seem far away, pitiful even, and we choose instead to hold it all in.

Hold those searing problems, those almost-tears, those aching hearts and the first signs of a panic attack welling up in our chests when we think too much about the Big, Bad Future.

For some reason, there’s a comfort in holding these all in, as if they might evaporate inevitably through our pores, rinsing off in the dank shower stalls where we’re unafraid to expose our true selves.

I am thinking that won’t happen.

It’s great in theory. Don’t get yourselves wrong. It seems almost plausible for those of us who are so far wrapped up in no longer admitting we have problems and choosing instead to coat our skin with misery.

That, my dears, is like coating your skin in maple syrup.

It’s sweet and smells amazing and tastes delicious, but man, that’s going to rip off some hair and maybe chunks of skin to leave your body looking like a sunburned mess.

It’s not worth it.

I know you might want to believe it. So do I, some days, but it’s not.

Please do me a small favor instead. Pull up a chair next to mine. Bring your favorite Starbucks drink.

You can tell me all about why you love Caramel Frappuccinos and Iced Peppermint Mochas and I can tell you about being comfortable in your own skin.

Enough so that your legs don’t jitter beneath that round fake-wood table because you’ve taken twenty minutes to just Be.

Enough for you. Enough for me. Enough.

And maybe those Starbucks dates will become routine until you’ve taught me about every beverage on that menu.

I know, I know. You’re an introvert, right?

via weheartit.com

Dear College Freshman,

Three years ago, this day seemed like an eternity away.

The 18-year-old girl curled up on her twin bed and faced the white drywall, sobbing into a pillow and praying her roommate was fast asleep.

She was 300 miles away from anyone who ever cared about her and sure she’d lost her friendship-building skills somewhere on the kindergarten playground.

College was just a bigger version of high school with a couple thousand feet of classrooms and a couple thousand faces she didn’t know.

It took 4 years for her to navigate the rough waters of high school and, she was sure, it’d take another 4 for her to do the same with college.

That, dear freshman, was her biggest mistake.

It’s easy to feel intimidated by a school with 18,000 strangers, but it’s hard to be too worried in a school with 18,000 friends.

It’s easy to believe those 4 years will beat you up and leave you lonely and bleeding in an alleyway somewhere.

Loneliness is beat out by one, and only one, thing—constantly surrounding yourself with people.

I know, I know.

You’re an introvert, right?

You want to stay in your dorm room and keep the door locked because that small talk conversation you might have with a hall mate about the kid in your science lab who keeps clearing his throat loudly is just painfully awkward.

I know.

I so know.

How badly do I know.

But there are people like me, seniors who haven’t had to restructure their whole lives to fit in, who are cheering on the sidelines of your life.

We’re waiting for you to do big things and share your thoughts and contribute because we know a secret you don’t: your thoughts are going to change the future.

You’re going to make the world a better place by being in it and living in it.

Not just hiding in your dorm room with ear buds in so no one can tell you’re in there.

Not in the study corral that’s tucked away in the back corner of the library where nobody thinks to hide out.

Not where the world can’t see you shine or hear your music or feel your soul.

No, my darling. You’ve got to step into the sunlight and risk getting a bit of a burn. You’ll be a tremendous asset to the rest of humanity if you do.

Progress comes from screwing up all the time. For three years, I’ve screwed up. And I’ll continue to do so. Not just for one more year, but for the rest of my life.

I’ll screw up and I’ll tell someone the wrong deadline for something I need. It’ll fall back on me. I’ll misunderstand an assignment and do it all wrong. I’ll pretend I know what I’m doing when, in reality, I haven’t the slightest idea.

We all fall down sometimes.

Oh freshman, would you believe me if I said I just want to be your friend?

So badly, I want to take you out for a cup of tea and let you know it’s going to be OK.

But mostly, I want to hear your side of the story.

I want to see the light shine in your eyes when you talk about why you chose this university and what you want to do in four years. I want to hear your plans.

You might not feel like anyone’s listening. Your parents pushed you to apply for scholarships and honors programs and take SAT prep courses and finally you’re starting to breathe and you’d rather be top dog in a small town again.

Guess what?

That’s over for a long time.

But I’m right here. Waiting for you to shuffle up to me with your map and a confused look on your face. I’ll point you in the right direction and take a snapshot of you in my head as you are now.

Because in 4 years, you’ll be someone else.

Someone new.

Squeeze time out of every day. Let busy become your best friend. Hold onto the ones you love—back home and here—and remember them always.

Learn how to talk and walk and communicate in transit. For four solid years, you’ll be in transit.

But I have a bus schedule and I’m waiting for you to show up with a helpless look so we can begin to understand each other.

Mostly, though, don’t underestimate yourself.

Love,
Kaleigh