Date: June 9, 2020
Time of post: 5:55 AM
Quarantine Day: 76
Last Song I Listened To: “Sit Still, Look Pretty" by Daya
Last Person I Communicated With: I sent a snapchat
that no one has responded to yet, lol
Last Thing I Ate: sugar-free caramel candy
Last Thing I Read: fanfic…again
Current Mood: reflective
One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: glued my “grow” wall
hanging back together after it fell and broke
One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: do my dishes
One Reason I’m Stressed Today: the world is a dumpster
fire
One Reason I’m Happy Today: Mikayla and Tyler are
coming back from Dallas this week!
Dear Apocalypsers,
I’ve been thinking a lot about
love lately. I know, who thinks about love when the world is full of so much
pain right now?
I think it’s a coping
mechanism. Right now, when there is so much fear and uncertainty and hate and
violence and injustice, finding a few minutes of love and happiness in a day
feels like a big middle finger to a cruel universe that seems to want us to be
miserable.
And, I really hate being
told what to do, so my survival mode is now “happy out of spite.” It’s not a
perfect defense. It’s sometimes difficult to keep up. It’s sometimes
exhausting. But I’d hate to think what I’d become if I didn’t have it.
“There’s some good
in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.” –Samwise Gamgee, The
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
I agree with Sam, but I’m
always willing to recognize that we, as Americans and human beings, tend to
romanticize “the struggle.” The American Revolution is painted as this miraculous
“David vs. Goliath” story that led to our freedom from an oppressive
government, but we don’t want to think about what that was actually like. The
weeks or months without bathing, sweating and marching in suffocating summer
heat, covered in blood, mud, wounds, and God-knows-what else; dying from
frostbite in the winter because the militias didn’t have proper clothing or
equipment; starvation and dehydration. And the World Wars? We love to make
those sound like a sepia-colored romance. Sure, the soldier protagonist might
watch his buddies die, but he always makes it home. He always
gets the girl. And the U.S. always wins—because that’s history. We don’t like
to think about the families of our protagonist’s friends who died. We don’t
like to think about the families of the people he killed—and they weren’t all
monsters, you know.
One of my favorite poems
is “Dulce et Decorum est” by Wilfred Owen. He wrote it about his experience as
a soldier in WWI. I’ll give you fair warning, it’s hard to read, but it ends
with the lines “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children
ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro
patria mori.” (Those Latin lines translate to “It is sweet and fitting / to
die for one’s country.)
I think about this poem a
lot. Owen understood 100 years ago that we glorify war. We romanticize a lot of
things. Especially history. The pessimistic reading of all this would be that
humans are foolish and selfish and that winners write history, so why would
they care what it took to win? The more realist reading might be that nationalist
victory stories sell, and a sad patriotic film or book won’t be as successful
as something with some kind of at least hopeful ending. The optimistic reading
is that we want to believe everything will be happy in the end; we want all of
the suffering to be worth it. I realize that I’m privileged enough to see the
world through the third lens. Not everyone has been able to take that approach.
And I always wonder what
that “good” is that Sam talks about. What makes humans willing to undergo that
suffering? What do we fight for?
I’m probably over-generalizing
here, but I think it’s some kind of intersection between love, hope, and
happiness. That’s what I would fight for, anyway.
I’ve love love in all its
forms. I say “in all its forms,” because I’ve never been in romantic love.
Still, when I can’t fall asleep at night, I plan weddings to calm myself down.
My Pinterest account is 80% themed weddings, 10% quotes, and 5% nurseries. If I
had a do-over in life, I’d be a wedding planner or open a bridal shop. And I’ve
always loved love. I still remember the first couple I ever “shipped”
(long before Tumblr coined the phrase.) They were two 6th grade
classmates who nervously held hands for a couple weeks and “broke up.” They’re
now both married to other people, but at the time, I fully believed they would
marry each other. I didn’t really understand love then.
 |
| Please enjoy my themed wedding boards. From L: engagement rings, a Broadway-themed wedding, a zoo wedding, a hipster wedding, a LOTR nursery, a Harry Potter Wedding, a Doctor Who wedding, and a LOTR wedding. |
I guess you could say
that I don’t really understand love now, either, if my notebooks full of crossed
out “Mr. and Mrs. ____”/ “Mr. and Mr. _____” / “Mrs. and Mrs. _____” are any
indication. I’d say that love disappoints me about 98% of the time, seeing as
only two real-life couples that I’ve shipped have gotten married. (Shout out to
Katelyn & Griffin and Hollie & Daniel!) And, as someone who hates unnecessary
risk, I really should look at those numbers and accept that I shouldn’t be as
invested in love as I am.
 |
| Me with the new Katelyn & Griffin McDaniels at their wedding on October 27, 2018. (I was the Maid of Honor!!) |
 |
| Me with the new Hollie and Daniel Mayes at their wedding on October 12, 2019. #PowerCOMple |
I’ve witnessed a lot of
heartbreak between the ages of 12 and 24, and I’ve lost weeks’ worth of sleep
staying up consoling friends. (I wouldn’t have it any other way, so don’t try
to stop me.) I’ve perfected every way of saying, “You deserve better,” and “You
have so much worth even if you don’t have them.” When I was first introduced to
true heartbreak, I was in 8th grade. My best friend had just been
dumped by her sophomore boyfriend the week of their 2-month anniversary. She cried
in the cafeteria. At first, when faced with breakups, I’d ask my parents to
drive me and my friend to the mall for ice cream and window shopping. By high
school, we were old enough to drive ourselves. In undergrad, sometimes a text
or phone call was all we could manage because of distance; or, if it was one of
my friends from undergrad, we’d stay up late into the night, watching movies
and crying and hashing it all out in my dorm. With every breakup, though, my
heart broke a little, too. I always want my friends to be happy; I don’t want
to see them heartbroken; I want them to have that “happily ever after” (even
though I took a fairytales class last fall, and I know that the original
fairytales didn’t have the happy ending connotations that we think of today). But
despite all of the pain I’ve witnessed first-hand, I still shrieked when one of
my friends told me that she was seeing a guy and she wanted me to meet him. I’m
still planning the housewarming gifts for my other two friends who moving in
with their boyfriends this summer. I can’t seem to give up on love. I have too
much hope.
That isn’t to say that I
don’t have my moments of cynicism. There was a period of four days during my
first semester of grad school where I didn’t believe in love. It was a rough
four days, ask anyone. I can’t even tell you what sparked that episode, but it
honestly felt like a core part of my personality was taken away. All I remember
is that we were reading Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass (2000) in
class, and our professor asked us what we thought about the preteen
protagonists’ declarations of love at the end of the book. And I said something
to the effect of, “We might think it’s dramatic reading it as adults, but for a
middle school audience, I think it’s fine. They’re still young and believe in
love and that it can last.” Now, I don’t what it was—my words or my tone or my delivery—but
the entire class laughed, and my professor (whom I have so so so much respect
for as a person and a scholar) just blanched. Thankfully, a couple mornings
later, I saw a couple holding hands on the sidewalk as I was driving to class,
and I didn’t want to run them over with my car, so I knew I was “recovering.”
 |
| (Ignore the time stamp) This is me and some friends at my Sophomore Elite Night (Spring semi-formal) on May 12, 2012. |
That was probably the
worst I’ve ever been. I had periods in high school and undergrad when I felt
down on myself for being single. (For instance, I’m still a little bitter that
I was never asked to any high school dance. That really got to me. I always
went with a group, and I had so much fun, but I was 14/15/16/17/18; I wanted to
feel wanted. Then in undergrad, I kid you not, that, for three of my four
years, there were 3 couples in our core group of 8 friends. I was
literally
always with at least one couple. [None of them are together anymore, by the
way.]
 |
| Me with some very good friends at my Junior Elite Night on February 16, 2013. |
(My dad used to tell me
that boys were “intimidated by me.” Good. If they’re intimidated by me because
I’m smart and opinionated and great at talking about my feelings, then they
wouldn’t last a week with me anyway. I try not to think about how he and my mom
stated dating my mom’s junior year of high school and how they were married by
the time they were my age.)
 |
| Most of my core group of high school friends at my Senior Elite Night on February 22, 2014. |
Then I got to grad school and I surrounded myself with more single people. They were my age and older, and they are some of the smartest, most talented and incredible people with incredible dreams and the work ethic to achieve them. I’ve gotten really comfortable being single these last two years, thanks to them. Because we took all the energy we would have put into a romantic relationship and we put it into each other, our schoolwork, and our friendship. We loved each other through the two most difficult years of my life to date. And, okay, we didn’t get a marriage out of our time together, but we got something that’s just as strong and will arguably last longer: friendship.
Dustin (one of the aforementioned
smart, talented, hardworking, incredible, and single grad students) and I were
talking about this the other day, how we, as a society, put so much pressure on
romantic love. When you say, “I’m dating so-and-so,” everyone knows that there
are only two ways that can end: marriage or a breakup. I’ve always thought of a
romantic relationship as the beginning of something new and exciting, but, when
you break it down like that, spending literally the rest of your life with
someone or giving them the best of you and getting heartbroken are equally
terrifying in different ways. I can see how thinking too much about that could
mess with any relationship. When you make a new friend, though, there feel like
so many more places that relationship could go. I guess if you get technical,
it’s the same two possible endings: you’ll either be friends for the rest of
your life, or you won’t be. But there feels like more ways that a friendship
can end that aren’t as painful as most breakups. So many times, friends just
grow apart because of time or distance, but that doesn’t even guarantee a
definite end like a breakup implies. For instance, just recently, I reached out
to a friend from high school who I had been really close to. I said something
about Niall Horan’s Heartbreak Weather album, because I knew he was her
favorite member of One Direction back in the day. And we started talking more
than we have in years. It wasn’t anyone’s fault that we drifted apart—we went
to different schools and moved to different cities and only saw each other in
passing at church functions on holidays—but I wouldn’t say that we ever stopped
being friends. Not like I would stop being someone’s girlfriend.
 |
| When you take pics like this, you'll probably be friends for a long time. |
And I just want to know
why.
Why do we expect so much
out of romantic love?
I can’t lie. I want to
fall in love so badly. As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to fall in love
and have a big winter wedding. (Remember all those Pinterest boards? Well, I
also keep a running list of who I’d want my bridesmaids to be—you know, just in
case that comes up.) I want to have 2-4 kids, whose names I’ve been thinking of
since I was 12 and was convinced I’d be marrying Nick Jonas. (Cringey Katie
moment: I was going to name our daughter Nicole Denise—Denise after his mom. A
sweet sentiment, but such a boring name.) So, yes, “falling in love” is at the
top of my bucket list. But, like I told a newly-single friend the other day, I’m
not going to put my whole life on pause to wait for a boy to catch up with me.
I have a lot of other things on my bucket list, too: get published in The
Lion and the Unicorn and ChLA Quarterly, write a book, visit Europe,
get a PhD, see a show on Broadway, go to a Taylor Swift concert (and probably
more). When a man comes along who wants to do all that, too, then he’ll be
welcomed into my life with open arms. To put it another way, I like YA
fantasy, and in one of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments books,
Magnus Bane—the immortal warlock—comments about how mortals are like stars, burning
bright for a short period of time. Whoever ends up with me better like
sunshine, because I want to burn so bright.
 |
| Get you a group of friends who will form a Harry Potter trivia team with you. (I love them even though we came in 2nd) |
Clearly, I put just as
much pressure on love as society tells me to. (I called it a "rebellion earlier; that's a pretty big deal.) I mean, as a teenager, I had “goals”
of being married with kids by 25. At 15, those 10 years felt like plenty of
time to “get my life together.” Now, writing this at 24, I’m laughing. Married
with kids is not in the cards for me in the next 8 months. Sorry,
Teenage Katie…but I think you’ll be pretty happy with what else you’ve
accomplished.
Like I said, I’ve gotten
comfortable with being single. If you asked me right now if I was happy, I’d
say, “Yes. Very.” (Okay, maybe not right now, but, like, pre-quarantine.
I was really happy the end of February/beginning of March.) I don’t want a
relationship just to be in a relationship, and I don’t want a relationship with
just anyone. When I do something, I put all my energy into it, and that, I’m sure,
will include romantic love. (Just ask my friends how “extra” I am in our
friendships.) And I want that reciprocated. I want to feel desired and wanted
and loved and appreciated.
And I’ll get it. I know
it. Because I see much love in all its forms every day. Sure, maybe only ~2% of
couples I’ve known have gotten married, but the love I see in those 2% show me
that I shouldn’t settle for anything less than that. I see love in my mom, who
makes sure to call me at least once a day. I see it in my friends who are
willing to move our weekly Zoom chat a day because I’m feeling shitty and depressed.
I see it in the way my friend lights up when she’s just talking about her new
boyfriend. I see the hope that the idea of love brings to everyone.
At the very beginning of
this post, I asked what kind of person obsesses over love when there was so
much pain and injustice in the world right now.
To answer my own
question, a person who refuses to give up.
Maybe I’m naïve or
unrealistic, but hope—and, specifically, a hope for more love—is what’s getting
me to each tomorrow.
Hey, we all need
something, don’t we?
May the odds be ever in
our favor,
Katie
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