Objectively speaking, they are just boxes- assorted shapes and sizes, some plastic and some cardboard.
On the outside, they give no indication of what they contain. So it is not the boxes themselves which cause the dilemma, the thought spirals, but what’s inside them.
My friends and I are having a hard time.
I had the honor of addressing Steel Valley’s 2017 Seniors to kick-off commencement season. The following speech was delivered at the Lawrence A. Griffin Senior Honors Banquet on May 4, 2017.
What to make of a writer who has forgotten how to write?
There are certain memories that stick out in Technicolor against the hazy grey of misremembrance- people, places, conversations all eventually fade into some sort of cerebral abyss, but snapshots of importance can be recalled as well in 30 years as though they had been experienced in just the previous 30 seconds.
I have a memory like this. I was 18, and we were in the final week of preparation before my debut as the Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper in Steel Valley Senior High School’s production of Anyone Can Whistle. I was just days away from committing to The University of Pittsburgh’s main campus (thank you very much) to study biology with an emphasis on pre-medicine. As we had dinner, my parents, Kelly, Spikey and I, my mother offered to play me a voicemail on our now-obsolete landline’s answering machine.
As we ate the meal my mother had prepared for us, I heard the voice of an admissions advisor, informing us that I’d been awarded a golden ticket- formally known as the William V. Campbell Family Endowed Scholarship, and that it was redeemable for four years of undergraduate education at Duquesne University: tuition free.
I did what most teenagers would in this situation. I bowed my head over my mother’s cooking and I burst into tears. That was the very first action of an incredible life-changing journey, one that I’ll be on until, well, I’m not.
From a genesis at a kitchen table in Munhall, Pennsylvania, I would go on to graduate from Duquesne University with a 4.0 GPA, two degrees (English and Public Relations, go figure), and a one-way bus ticket to employment in New York City. I am quite simply living my dream, the one I’d imagined in that frilly pink bedroom at an age that’s decidedly too young to be making that kind of decision. Bossy, loud, and incessant- I’d tell anyone who would listen about that dream: I’m going to get out of here, you know. I’m going to leave the Steel Valley, and I’m never coming back.
I am well aware that the title of this blog is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not even close to being a daily. Hell, it hasn’t even been a monthly since last October. It’s sort of been a vestige of my former self– a tribute to a life that I no longer lead, and haven’t led in quite some time. I stopped writing when I no longer wanted to know myself. When I no longer wanted to be intimately familiar with my thoughts and feelings– when I realized that I romanticize the people in my life to the extent that the way I view them is not the way that they actually are, but the way I believe they should be– a way that they never intended.
“If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere — but not because of something as banal as ‘job opportunities.’ It’s out of the sheer force of… will that brought you here when you could have had it easier somewhere else, where you would have driven a four-door sedan and shopped in suburban grocery stores with wide aisles and pristine parking lots and have had 2.5 children by the age of 28 and worked a 9-to-5 job in something [yawn] somewhere.” Source
The last time I wrote on this blog, I was saying goodbye to something exceptionally dear to me. Since then, I have had to say goodbye to hundreds of other things: my friends, my family, the only life I have ever really known. Soon, I will have been living in New Jersey for a month and working in New York for almost that amount of time and let me tell you– it still doesn’t seem real. It still doesn’t seem like I’ve actually done what I set out to do all those years ago. It still doesn’t seem like the reality that I’m living is just that- reality.
I got a phone call this afternoon offering me an interview for a position at a marketing company in Manhattan. But once I explained I am still in college, I was told to get in contact with them once I graduate.
This is the first call I’ve received that actually gave me hope, even though nothing ended up coming from it. Because now, I have a new sense of resolve in the fact that just because I have sent in what feels like hundreds of applications doesn’t mean I’m not getting a job– it just means that the timing is wrong.
Spring break is approximately half over and I have much still to do (as my professors decided to make midterms the week we come back- both a blessing and a curse). And as I’ve sat alone in Brottier Hall while my friends have traveled to distant corners of the Earth, I have learned some very important lessons.
Katie Bennett Writes 