This photo from 80/35 captures my summer vibes.

It is funny how I find myself cobbling together bits and pieces of me, envisioning some kind of perfect, never-to-be-realized blend of my existence. I want the free time of my 17-year-old summer. I want to play tennis like 18-year-old Taylor. I want to drink like 21-year-old me. But I reject each of them in their wholeness, remembering the awkwardness of my college search at 17, the cancer scare at 18, the boy I spent a year-and-a-half getting over at 21.

I am eternally cobbled together, a blend of good and bad, of clumsy transitions and moments in which I feel like a damn fine grown-up lady. This is 23, to quote my own Twitter saying like a true millennial.

2016 is erratic, an unpredictable compilation of tedium and triumph. I got blood transfusions. A man told me he loved me and meant it. I ran a half-marathon. I cried about bread. I took the LSAT. (I took a lot of shots after getting my LSAT score back.) I survived six weekly IVs. Continue reading →

In other life news, I tried to be one with nature last weekend. I took a selfie in a park and went trail running.

We sprawled on the floor of his fraternity house, rulers, paper slips and Spotted Cow bottles encircling us. We taped and talked, perfecting the poster for his senior pre-law thesis. He wanted to study sports law. I wanted to make it through my junior journalism capstone. He wanted to get into Marquette (he did). I wanted to stay in Des Moines and find a summer internship. That semester-long, unspoken “What are we?” flirtationship faded with his graduation, but I kept law school in mind.

I remember looking at law programs my junior and senior years of college. I didn’t tell anyone, even as the guy I was seeing navigated the law school application process.

We’re not ready for our dreams sometimes. Continue reading →

He texted me from airport gates and streets named “Taylor” in faraway cities. “Taylor Street” in San Francisco lingers in my mind, as if I’ve been there before, as if I existed then, there, with him. The “Wish You Were Here” postcards never came.

Innocent objects in my apartment bear unwarranted significance. The plant I bought one Saturday night when he was in Asia. The photo of snow swirling from my apartment window on a December day when he was in California. The stacks of books that disappeared and the new ones that replaced them, each one a mark of time passing, events missed, two lives mismatched like my middle school outfits. My life passed in the photos I texted him, exhibits of the ordinary.

I highly recommend painting the solar system when you’re in need of perspective.

The “Wish You Were Here” postcards never came.

He told me stories, showed me entire photo albums. I existed only when it was convenient, close; I wished I were there. I wanted to exist when it was tough, when we were far apart.

He was transient, and I was, too, I suppose, trapped in a cycle of doctor’s appointments and blood tests and what ifs. “Meaningful” and “forever” are too often synonymous, as if the relationships that last are more important, more pivotal than the ultimately noncommittal.

For a long time I rejected the notion that it had been worthwhile, focusing instead on the texts that grew farther apart, the goodbyes we simply forgot to exchange at that last happy hour. Yet he was exactly what I needed when I needed it. I needed to be committed to my health, to the half-marathon I was training for, to the LSAT. Continue reading →

It’s Monday, so here’s a peaceful lookout at the Des Moines Art Center.

I wrote in doctor’s waiting rooms, in the winding hallways of Mercy Medical Center, in the infusion room, in my hospital bed between naps. I wanted to capture everything, my feelings, my pain, the sight of forbidden Hy-Vee cake on my mother’s birthday. My writing this year has been aggressively present, work that exists and thrives in the moment it first existed, doesn’t dare to extend too far beyond the physical and tangible.

Transcending the physical experience scared me, as if recognizing the reflective might be too much, another needle prick. I’ve been feeling better, perfectly well, even, for a few weeks.

I hid my writerly mind in LSAT logic games and reasoning timed tests, productively procrastinating the reflection my free time would inevitably offer.

As a life writer, reflection is my wheelhouse; I look back and ruminate constantly, writing and re-writing about the same experiences over and over, convinced there is another nugget of significance forever waiting to be unearthed. Yet this year I found survival in the now. I wrote about cinnamon bun cravings and my breakup with beer and throwing a gluten-free fit when bread-loving Oprah popped up on my TV. Continue reading →

Thanks to my coworkers for the positive LSAT vibes!

Tiny poke, quick poke, little poke. The words and needle pricks add up after a while. I didn’t feel the needle on Wednesday as the nurse and I chatted about our mutual experience learning Arabic. It was a bizarrely normal moment; me rambling about Turkey and Arabic and calligraphy and writing right to left — with the needle in my arm.

In my fledgling days of life writing, I wrote exclusively about major, sweeping stories and lessons, the kind that fit nicely into a calculated essay. The past six months upended my still-lingering compulsion to write about the momentous, distilling reflection and learning into single moments — tiny, quick and little, like every needle puncture.

As I tally up answers and scores and sections for the LSAT (which is, terrifyingly, tomorrow), I can’t help but feel unsettlingly, briefly calm. I often cite the randomness of life as one of its chief merits, but here, it is beautifully analogous, each answer adding up to a test, a score, a new goal and path.  Continue reading →

Attack. It was a word I heard often throughout my prep tennis career. “Attack the net.” “Attack the serve.” “Attack the baseline.” You know the drill.

“Attack” was always something I controlled and carried out, something orchestrated, calculated and decided by minute adjustments in grip, swing and step. I knew how, when and where to attack. Attacking meant winning.

One time I held up the sun, so I guess my problems aren’t so big after all.

“Attack” means something different in the autoimmune world, I’ve learned this year.

Celiac disease is an autoimmune disease. My body attacks itself, without my permission, attacking until I ended up in the emergency room, pumped full of blood and fluids and powerlessness.

That’s the thing about autoimmunity. I am no longer the attacker; I am the one being attacked, by my own body, my own cells, my own biology. The roles reversed in unnerving, invisible clarity.

“I’m tired” cruelly colors everyday conversation, and this year has revealed its pervasiveness. At the height of my illness, I almost felt hurt when friends said, “I’m tired” in response to, “How are you?” when I was powerless in explaining my own exhaustion. I couldn’t control my energy levels with rest, and I couldn’t even control the English language enough to express it. Continue reading →