It has been a minute, queridxs.
I had envisioned I would update this space weekly on Tuesdays (like Beyoncé unleashing new music). But, I had also envisioned I would slay the whole semester and coast through. I am still learning about myself, it seems. And I have changed so much in this last few months.
There was the chaos of going through physical changes - the moving, the new climate, the near constant struggle to not fall into nocturnal living. In some ways I think I’m tapping some primordial part of myself where my focus stays on my work, my food, and my sleep. I haven’t reached out to see people much. My fault really and I did have considerable body pain for a good amount of time, mostly as a response to all the changes, but also I blame COVID still for being careful with my excursions. I’m an introvert so let me have this.
Then there was the whole “scholarship girl” syndrome, which made me feel distant from family at times, and from friends at times. I found myself over planning my final projects, sometimes so overwhelmed by what I was trying to complete but then found that I had planned for some of it well before with initial notes, saved research texts, and regular communication with my instructors. This over planning is what saved me in the end. Yes, I planned for a lot but I knew enough to plan ahead some because there were moments where I felt undeserving, which would slow my reading or my work output.
I used to feel this sense of undeserving when I started my undergraduate degree a very long time ago. At times it made me doubt myself and my ability. At times it was paralyzing. I know enough about this that I have been able to check in with my own child to be sure she is okay. She is similar to me in a lot of ways. If I can get into “work mode” I do well for long periods of time. I remember when I returned to school about a dozen years ago. I got into a consistent schedule: Take my daughter to school or day care, head to work (picking up coffee on the way), study or write a paper during lunch, head to campus for classes, then head home to find my little one - fed and bathed by my mom - waiting for me so we could have 30 minutes or so together before she went to bed and I returned to writing papers or reading. I was younger then some part of me taps into this history and I find strength in knowing I will work on the things I think are important. With the feeling of accomplishment there are fewer and fewer moments where I undermine myself.
I know it’s crazy to think but I never let myself say out loud until today that I was the first in my family, on both sides, to graduate from college. I’ll be the first to have a master’s degree teaching, of all things, poetry and creative voice. My daughter will be the first doctor in a long line of working class people who believed the American Dream was acquired slowly, over generations, each doing better than the one before, or so they hoped. Whew.
The intelligence was always there. The opportunity. The time. The money and the desire. Those were harder to acquire or sustain.
I have to attribute my hunger for knowing from my family. My grandfather was a voracious reader. I would read his Reader’s Digest magazines in Spanish. My mother watched news stories and read a crazy mix of Santeria nonfiction books, true crime and biographies, and the occasional Mexican graphic novels like Semanal. My father could spend hours recounting what happened in the war or explain how he figures out where small cracks in a car’s body are hiding. One grandmother knew how to survive. Another was independent and could have been a business woman as she negotiated her own sales in the neighborhood. All of these ancestors with their curiosity. adrienne maree brown says it’s never too late to learn something is you are a curious person. I like to believe that curiosity is inherited. What pulls at us is distinct, but what makes us want to know something is that same curiosity.
Here’s to you finding what piques your curiosity. Let it take you.