New Realities by Michelle
Michelleof New York's entry into Varsity Tutor's May 2017 scholarship contest
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New Realities by Michelle - May 2017 Scholarship Essay
“On the drive home, a postlapsarian melancholy crept over me. I had failed some unspoken initiation rite, and life’s possibilities were no longer infinite.” – Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
As a diligent archivist of her own life, Alison Bechdel understands life’s complexity in her graphic novel Fun Home through depicting ordinary moments with a spectacular juxtaposition of elaborate narrative analysis and realistic images of domestic life. Similiarly, as a creative writer, I tend to elevate small moments in my life into surreal, but only sometimes inspiring, conclusions. Just as after the small moment in Bechdel’s childhood of seeing a snake and running to get help from a male babysitter Bechdel believes that the gun-slinging masculinity she idolizes is forever inaccessible to her, a few years of shyness can escalate into the conclusion that I’ll never fit in anywhere socially. I might see my father’s use of skin tonics as a tendency toward the outward perfection required to conceal a tumultuous family life. The electric peace I feel whenever I do spoken word and public speaking, sometimes in front of enormous audiences and under lights as varied as the steady gold of Lincoln Center, the shade-stippled sun of a hipster Iowa City coffee shop, and the white noon of the NYC Poetry Festival, suddenly reflects an aversion to spontaneous verbal communication and a preference for long-pondered-over words. And with an ordinary three-day college visit, I can say that I left my heart in upstate New York.
It wasn’t New York that did it but the rare moment of organic meditation — I felt perceived truisms and societal constructs melting and shuffling away the further I got from home. Just as the trees suddenly had blazing red leaves instead of green ones, bits of cloth as beautiful as the ones in the Brooklyn Museum, I could shed my belief in myself as socially inept, invoke real change, and have dozens of friends and sleepovers under my belt. Just as Bechdel reflects on herself during a car ride, traveling animated me enough to see myself as changeable and self-improvable in the snow that began dusting creek edges the further north we got and the flashes of approaching hills.
I stayed with people I would have never have had the bravery to talk to without my ability to dissect ordinary observations into something profound. Over three days, me and three other visitors slept on the ground and chatted with the two black host students. And I agreed with Bechdel that life’s possibilities were no longer infinite – the awkward social encounters as a kid would have to stay – but it was never too late for an initiation rite.
On Halloween weekend Talei, a host student, threw me a spare red sweatshirt. “You can be Thing Two with me.” All of us headed out to the mysterious, oft-mentioned RTC the day before we were supposed to leave. “You sure you want to show the high school kids that?” Jack, a student living next door, raised his eyebrows as we left the dorm. But we threaded ourselves across campus to a thin white door at the back of the college’s most notorious, socially-influential frat house.
“Mm-mmm.” One of the bouncers glanced at his list. “This party is for specific people.” The diffracted shame of such a blunt rejection hit hard, but I would later smile back in our crowded room, in awe at how easily I talked, laughed, and relaxed. Those moments of seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary trees and weather had allowed me to envision and enact a new reality for myself.
A theme in Bechdel’s novel is the conviction that she can never know her father completely, lost as he is to the past. But she tries throughout, and I realized that my bildungsroman can be transformed just as Bechdel’s was by mining the sharply-observed little moments that make up all lives.