So, I graduated college. I figure now is a good time to update this thing.
President Steven Sample was a great speaker at the ceremony. I feel bad for dissing the school’s decision to let him be the speaker. He told a hilarious story about a Bruin in Heaven, which ends with the Bruin discovering that God is a Trojan. He told us to seriously consider how we feel about money, children and God.
I am after a feeling. Not an occupation or a person or a thing or even a situation. A feeling. This feeling can’t be acquired through money or materials or even any specific experience.
It is rootedness. The sensation of remembering or rediscovering something that has been there all along. Something that I often neglect and forget about and for some reason can’t keep my grip around. It is a feeling like everything is going to be okay. Not “okay” in the sense that tragedies are certainly not going to happen, or that I’m going to end up happy or successful. But simply that I will always, even if I lose everything and everyone, have myself. I will always have this relationship with this thing at my core to return to, this trust, this ability to breathe and be grateful for the ability to be.
I got that feeling today while talking with Alex. Graduation was pretty anti-climactic for me. It happened so quickly and it didn’t even feel like it was happening. My mother ended up bringing her boyfriend despite my pleas and our lunch at Benihana was uncomfortable and disappointing. But it was also enlightening – I realized that although I need to respect my family I do not need to like them. I do not need to be close with them. I do not need to let myself be hurt by them.
And then my conversation with Alex today helped me realized more. I don’t owe my mother anything, even though she likes to make me feel that I do. “You have become who you are IN SPITE OF your mother, not because of her.” She paid for college and high school and everything I have ever needed and without her I would not be graduating from this amazing university. But she has never been there for me in any real sense, nor has my father, despite my improving relations with him. (His behavior during lunch gave me a reality check that he still really is his cynical cruel self). Everybody in my family is incredibly selfish. The paradox with my mother is that she is selfish in her selflessness. She wants to be a martyr. A victim. I don’t want to be a part of that and I need to figure out a way to distance myself from it, I guess first by coming to grips with it.
I started realizing this when Chris told me his father was not coming to his graduation, but that he didn’t mind because it’s just a ceremony and his father has been there for him in a very real sense all his life. With my mother, it’s the opposite – she commits all these symbolic gestures to show me that she cares, but never actually is there for me.
I did not think I would be seeing Alex again, after an exchange of angry/awkward text messages. I saw him at graduation, while he walked and while his mother embraced him afterward. We did not acknowledge each other’s existences. But today we decided to meet for coffee and when he walked into Starbucks, Jose Gonzalez was playing and then we talked sincerely. I felt like I was tiptoeing because I did not want to ruin the dynamic that we had somehow managed between us. Vibrating at the same exact frequency like we used to and simply LISTENING to each other the way it’s so difficult to do with anybody else.
Then we walked around campus and eventually sat down on the Grassy Knoll just talking about the past and the present and the future, and about mistakes and our changing characters and our static natures and how everything is going to be okay.
I needed that. I’ve been having difficulty lately, especially during graduation as it became blatantly apparent that I do not have any real friends. Ana is all the way in Paris and the only way we can communicate is by videochat and email/Facebook. Everybody else I’ve been hanging out with is just so much closer to one another than to me and it’s really sad for me to realize this. Alex brought up a good point during our talk, even though I didn’t even tell him about all that. He said that he thinks I am into a culture/scene whose members do not vibrate at the same frequency as me – who do not have the same mentality, the same appreciation for knowledge just for knowledge’s sake (You know what I think you should do? This is just a suggestion, take it or leave it. I would love to take a class by Professor Guerrero some day).
But in my late 20s, early 30s when I am meeting lots of people in my same field and with my same ambitions, I will start to meet more people who do vibrate at this same frequency – people who, during college, just happened not to share my love for electronica and raves and the scene I chose to take part in. This is probably why I have such a hard time ever feeling rooted or satisfied with my interpersonal world: because I made the decision to immerse myself with a certain crowd that did not share my deeper mindset. (and because I have been going from boyfriend to boyfriend to boyfriend).
So that was an explicit reassurance that everything is going to be okay, without my even asking for it. I feel luckier to have met him than I can express. I don’t think anyone has had such a positive influence on my life, and it’s a shame that it’s so difficult for us to be friends.
But more than the explicit reassurance was the merging once again with this thing at my core, this trust/love/respect simply for being alive and doing my best and knowing just by breathing that everything is going to be okay, no matter what happens.
Like Steven Sample said at the ceremony: it’s character that matters, and if the last 22 years are any indication, my character is capable of transcendence.
Things always end up the way they should. And I am full of gratitude.
