An attempt at Throwback Thursday

I don’t normally participate in the Throwback Thursday trend, you know posting old photos where I look all young and cute (maybe because my old photos usually trend toward young and dorky?), but today I’m feeling nostalgic. And it’s Thursday. So here goes.

#tbt

Here’s me approximately two years and eight months ago, sneaking in late to the Emerson College New Graduate Student Orientation (I hadn’t learned that the MBTA requires buffer time built into your schedule), and sitting stiffly through a day of death-by-powerpoint presentations reminiscent of military briefings, except instead of camo the audience was in plaid. We were herded to our department meetings, where the Writing, Literature and Publishing program (predictably, in hindsight) miscounted and didn’t have enough chairs. Look! There’s Jen and Shannon sitting on the floor! The department head gave a speech that equally excited and freaked me out. Something along the lines of: everything up until this point doesn’t matter; you need to prove you belong in this program.

Here’s me a week later, in my first ever graduate nonfiction writing workshop, passing out copies of a bare-all-my-baggage essay about my post-deployment mental health struggles to a group of people I’d known for approximately two hours. I knew them enough to know most had little experience with the military. This was New England. This was academia. Here’s me wondering if I’m a masochist.

The feedback those strangers gave me the following week propelled me to a year later. Here’s me submitting that same essay to a contest with Glamour magazine. Here’s me dancing around the living room on the phone with an editor after she informs me that I won.

Here’s that essay last October in the magazine. Here’s that essay last month in my graduate thesis. There’s my cap and gown, ready for Sunday’s commencement ceremony.

When I left the military in Dec 2010, I applied to graduate school in part because I didn’t know what else to do. I was giving up financial stability for (at least temporary) geographic stability. The economy sucked. I had no expectations of a creative arts degree setting me up on a financially viable career path, but I was ready to take a risk to try my hand at something I loved. I hoped Emerson would help me become a better writer and find my footing in the publishing world.

My amazing, talented, and super serious Emerson gang

I never expected my classmates to become my best friends. As it turns out, swapping baggage facilitates bonding. We read the most intimate details of each other’s’ lives, and we weren’t strangers anymore. We were supporters, cheerleaders, commiserators, grammar Nazis, drinking buddies, and so much more.

I didn’t expect to not only find my footing in the publishing world—I’m graduating with a decent publication record, a year of editorial experience, and even a couple paychecks—but also to be welcomed into a talented, vibrant community of veteran-writers. (I definitely didn’t expect to be engaged to one of them!) Here’s us sitting around a restaurant table at an annual writing conference in March. I look around at the array of funky-to-nerd-chic hairstyles and listen in to a conversation analyzing Ulysses as a post-war model for the “new man,” and remark: “Looking at us, you’d have no idea we’re all veterans.” Across the table someone observes: “I think we’re all that one person who didn’t quite fit in in our units.”

Here’s me finding my niche.

Happy graduation, and thanks beyond words to everyone who helped me get here.