My sister is right, the selfie lighting in my Des Moines apartment is excellent.

As I move through my apartment on Saturday mornings, watering my plants, removing a layer of dust from nearly every surface, both cursing and revering my giant south-facing windows, I listen to podcasts. I fill my home with others’ voices, their stories in rhythm with the tasks on my weekend to-do list.

For a long time, I was afraid of the silence in my own home.

There is sameness in silence, the way it always invites my pesky restlessness to the forefront, compelling me to counter it with chatter, sound, anything. I’ve felt alarmingly uninspired by my writing the past couple months amid the shuffle of law school visits, planning a European trip and making moving plans for the fall. Every time I sit down to write, I don’t know where to start: the planning, the quitting, the leaving, the moving, the resettling. It all blurs into feelings, anxieties and impatience I can’t bear to sort out.

But when I find myself unanchored in the one thing I can (usually) count on — words — I moor myself to the sounds of where I am, sounds that so often fade into the background of living, breathing, doing. Continue reading →

Sentences have been swallowed whole by my lists as of late, rambling prose reduced to items crossed off on my phone, laptop, the tired Post-It note clinging to my refrigerator by a single corner. There’s the trip, the future apartment, the other trip, the moving-out checklist. I keep them in separate online and tangible realms to maintain a sense of singularity. If I only see a single list, for a moment, it’s the only one that exists.

It is strange outgrowing a place I thought I could (and sometimes, would) stay forever. Things are winding down here: volunteer commitments, my lease, the job I’ve had and loved for nearly three years. My last Drake Relays for a while are coming up next weekend.

Everything here feels connected.

I’ve been running to different intersections from my Des Moines experience. Up Grand, up that never-ending hill with its menacingly slow gradient, up to 31st Street, where I used to live, up to Kingman Boulevard, where I first started running long distances during my freshman year of Drake. Back down Grand, where I did my first eight-mile run downtown my sophomore year, thinking I had achieved some ultimate distance. Continue reading →

These are my words, and they’re on a wall! You can (actually) read them below.

I remember reading The Great Gatsby for the first time during the spring semester of my junior year of college. It was my responsibility to help a high school student in Mexico analyze and write about the book for a class; I was a teacher, editor and student, all at once. Yet I forgot all of those things as I read The Great Gatsby. The rich prose, symbolism, the almost characters — I got lost in the surreal, dark, glamorous world. It helped me heal after the passing of a beloved professor and a devastating ghosting experience (hey, I was 21 at the time). It was exactly the book I needed.

Divine book interventions are a thing, I swear. Last month, I selected two books for my inspiration in writing a piece for The Des Moines Girl Gang’s “The Well-Read Woman” art show at the Young Women’s Resource Center in Des Moines. I returned home with Voice Lessons by Nancy Mairs and The Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan. Both books explored what it means to go through life in a feminine body and what it means when that body turns on itself. I somehow managed to pick two books among stacks and stacks that dealt extensively with autoimmune disease, something I understand. Continue reading →

My mother says Sparty and I both look dignified.

Life hovers above my head like a tennis ball just before I serve. With a looping motion, I hit it away, along with blog ideas, career goals, my law school decision. Sometimes the next five months overwhelm me, but the future can feel like that, I suppose. Instead, I picture each decision and each change as one serve, falling into the correct box, right where I want it, every time.

I make sense of life through tennis; it distills chaos and choices into forehands and serves. A natural, if not slightly smug reminder that I need to slow down and hit one ball, make one decision, at a time.

This weekend I visited the Michigan State University College of Law in East Lansing. I had never been to Michigan, and it was my first law school visit as an admitted student. Campus is a sprawling web of beautiful, old buildings — obscured only by swirling wind and snow I had strangely missed all winter in Iowa. Continue reading →

My coworkers are lovely.

For all the ire it draws, winter weather rejuvenates and enlivens me every year. There’s something comforting about the possibility that I could peer out my window one moment and everything will be different, obscured in a curtain of swirling Midwestern mayhem. An ice storm is set to hit this evening and the anticipation is almost intoxicating — I want to see and feel my world changing. That’s how I feel about life right now, too. It’s changing, but not yet a swirl; it’s a slow, delightfully dizzying spin.

Two weeks ago I got into my top-choice law school. I heard the news as I walked to my job from an off-site work meeting, happy tears clinging to my frozen skin in the morning cold. I don’t think they’ve completely melted; I’m still in disbelief I got in.

Part of me is greedy for all the changes the next few months will bring; I wish they could swirl in like the snow and rain, blinding what was visible, familiar and comfortable. I love my job, my apartment, my volunteer work and my friends in Des Moines, but every day, there are little reminders that it’s time to leave — and that’s OK. My impatience is confirmation that I’m moving on to something that’s right for me, that’s more challenging while fitting into my existing advocacy goals. Continue reading →

I haven’t been eating enough. I know it. Snacks nest at the bottom of my hulking work bag, they nest in my desk, left to exist and expire in peace. What do you do when the thing that keeps you alive was the same thing that was destroying you? When it caused your body to wage war on itself.

Bruised and splotchy, I examine the latest apple I found at the bottom of my purse, the one I knew was there but tried so hard to forget. Finally, I bite into it, eating around the bruises. Some stretch all the way to the core, creating pathways of pain to the apple’s center. I feel like this in 2016; bruised to the core, waiting to heal from wounds that exist much deeper than the surface reveals.

My elbow rests on my hipbone as I drift to sleep; sometimes it fits there a little too well, chronic illness and a tired year carving away at my existence.