Radioactive

Amanda wants pictures on my blog...hope she's happy! :P

     I got home from my fourth MFA residency on Sunday.  There’s something the director always says in the wrap-up, which is that the residency has made us radioactive.  It basically means our writerly energy is palpable, but I like the thought of having a chemical glow.  I know, it’s weird, but whatever.
    It’s hokey, and everyone probably saw this coming, but when Imagine Dragons’ "Radioactive" came out, I thought it was a perfect representation of what we feel after residency.  When he takes the deep breath at the beginning of the song, it’s like us leaving campus.  Take a deep breath and go back to the real world.  He says he feels it in his bones, and I do, too.  I feel the love for my craft and for other people’s efforts at it.  I feel the love for the people I’ve met here, and it makes living in the real world without them, or at least without them in the flesh, more bearable.  That high concentration takes a while to leave my system, and it helps me steel myself against an immediate world that doesn’t understand me like they do.
    I like the thought of the energy created here putting off a tangible aura.  I like the thought of my family and the people around me being jealous of me, because I spend most of my time being jealous of them.  They can live their life without overanalyzing TV shows, books, and movies, and without getting lost in the “what ifs” of situations.  I envy being able to just exist without these thoughts weighing me down.
    Which doesn’t mean I don’t like who I am.  I didn’t used to like anything about myself, really, but now I do, and I won’t apologize to anyone for it.  I’ve grown into myself, particularly in the last year and a half, as one of my classmates pointed out to me.  She said that since she’s known me (she is in the same semester as I am), I’ve grown leaps and bounds in self-confidence, and I’ve come out of my shell.  That’s really saying something, because the shell I was in was deep, and part of it was not my own construction.  Without the program, I would never have felt like I deserved better than my ex.  But in a strictly school sense, she’s right.  When I started the program, the student reading almost gave me an anxiety attack, and it only had to be two minutes long.  I couldn’t read in public satisfactorily, and now I can.  I also introduced my mentor at a reading this past residency, something else I wouldn’t have been able to do before, and I wrote a freaking thirty-six page critical thesis.  I tend to be a quieter person, but I’m learning how to insert myself in conversations, and to laugh with my whole body when I think thinks are funny instead of suppressing it to a small chuckle.  This might be bad though, since sometimes I can definitely hear that my laugh is louder than everyone else’s.  Whatever, as I said earlier, I’m not apologizing.
    I owe the program a lot, and I’m sad that it’s almost over.  I’m trying to accept that not everything can last forever, but I do not want this magic to end.  I love the people I’ve met here, and most of them don’t live close to be by any means.  It’s going to be really depressing to not know when I’ll see them again, and to likely never see them all together again.
    Re-entry was hard this time, even with Amanda with me.  I feel so alive at residency, and the weight I carry around of no one (except, at times, my immediate family) understanding what my life is like is gone.  It was hard this time because there is only one more time.  I graduate in the Summer, and then I’m on my own.  I live close by, so I can come back to audit classes and go to readings and attend graduation, but it won’t be the same.  In the Winter, no one in my semester will be there, or it will be a special surprise if they are.  It’s all so bittersweet, and I feel like I’m not ready, but I have no choice.  I’m not too worried about my creative thesis or my class (another thing I wouldn’t have been able to do a year and a half ago).  I’m worried about not having this magic bubble anymore.  Of course, my favorite people live on the complete opposite side of the country, and I would hurry up and get financial independence and get my butt out there, but I can’t leave the girls and I can’t leave one other person.  Maybe I’m being ridiculous about them and I can leave, but my complicated feelings about that are another post entirely.  I just feel this very powerful pull from both sides, and all I can do for the moment is stay where I am because I have no money and no way (ie big kid job) of getting any.
    I hope the next residency goes by slower than this one did.