One decade ago, to this very day, I graduated from high school, and what better time to be retrospective???

On the 25^th of May 2013, I woke up fifteen minutes before my alarm to a phone call from my nanna, sending me all the love in the world and wishing she could be there, as she wasn’t well enough to travel that weekend. My Grandma Jan was still alive and very concerned that we would all be late. My brother ironed my gown with the precision that only his career in the Army could have taught him, and my childhood home was alive with laughter, conversation, and my unstoppable tears. This was it. Nothing would ever be the same.

Anyone who knew me back then will tell you that I woke up crying and cried pretty much non-stop until 9pm that evening. You see, I grew up in a tiny community, and many of the people I entered kindergarten with walked the graduation stage with me thirteen years later. I was given three siblings by my parents and countless others by the local school district. I was ready for the next chapter and to break free from the struggles I’d faced in my teenage years, but I wasn’t prepared to miss my friends.

And truth be told… I am still not ready to miss them.

Part of the thing about growing up in—and leaving—a small town is that you see people pretty regularly for the first few years, even those of us who moved away. There are weddings, trips home to visit parents, funerals, and moving vans to pick up hand-me-down furniture to bring you around. Then, at some point, everyone who was going to get married has, or you move too far away for bachelorettes and birthdays. Sometimes, you remain a cherished part of someone’s past but don’t make the cut to join them in their future.

I moved away. Far away. Multiple Times. And for every inch and every mile, I think about my friends and family, who I only see through social media feeds. Birthdays ping in my mind well before Facebook reminds me of them, and I watch our successes from the other side of the planet. One of us is a Lawyer, one played volleyball on the international stage, a few are living the perfect life they imagined on their family farms with children of their own now, and me? I’ve lived at least three different lives in the last ten years. I have loved each one for various reasons. Now, I am exactly where I dreamt I would be, but perhaps never expected to actually get to.

Ten years ago, I had a UK-themed grad party. My sister painstakingly decorated a cake with a Union flag on it. It was just the theme. I loved Doctor Who and other BBC Dramas; I watched the last Independence Referendum like a hawk, and it was just a wild dream that I’d even one day get to visit. Now, I live in Scotland.

I can’t imagine that Rhonee ever thought she’d have to mail my birthday gifts to Scotland as she piped the icing onto the cake… But here I am, currently waiting for the postie to knock on my door, with my birthday parcel in hand.

As I said, ten years is a lifetime and no time at all.

I have three advanced degrees and have had three dream jobs and just accepted a new one. I have beaten crippling depression and an eating disorder and come out happier than I ever imagined I could be. I have moved house twelve times. Loved, Lost, Loved, Lost, and Loved again. I laughed, cried, and faced every emotion under the sun, and I cannot wait to see what the next ten years will bring me.

I bought a record player yesterday. I do not have any vinyls, nor do I have anything to put it atop. I probably should have waited. There are probably things more reasonable and responsible on which to spend 180 quid at the minute, considering there is no furniture in my flat.

Do I regret the purchase?

No.

One Thousand, One Hundred, Twenty-two. Eleven Hundred and Twenty-two. 1,122 Days.

There were 1,122 days between the 14^th of March 2020, when my quarantine started in Philadelphia, and yesterday. For those who read my blogs from isolation, and the friends who know the ins and outs of my life, we all know The Pandemic and Quarantine were not the only major changes that I experienced that day or in the weeks, months, and years to follow. In the midst of my first quarantine period and the chaos of my perfect little life crumbling around me, I made a promise to myself.

I promised myself that the first frivolous, life-enriching, totally unnecessary purchase I would make when I got through that nightmare, would be a record player.  So, on the 9^th of April 2023—after 1,122 days of constant change, chaos, healing, moving, and growth—I bought my record player.

I made my purchase because, after so many days of reaching for the same contentment that I felt in my day-to-day life on the 13^th of March 2020, I finally felt it again yesterday.

Do not get me wrong, I have had moments of joy. I’ve achieved some of my wildest dreams and had moments that one might only think to exist in cheesy feel-good films. I am more deeply in love than I have ever been, I have made friends and learned new languages and skills. I have spent entire weeks without a single bad thought or emotion, but it was yesterday that I felt the dust settle and I knew I was wholly back to myself.

I’ve not written anything for this platform since my Influencers blog series. Since then, a lot has happened. In the last three-plus years, I have moved four times. I ended an engagement, had my heartbroken by the world crumbling around me, adopted a cat, moved to Scotland, went on MANY dead-end dates with people whose names I barely remember, did multiple research projects, learned to crochet, learned two new languages, fallen in love, and eaten an incredible amount of haggis. Through all that, some things in my life remain the same. The Words to Describe Michelle wordcloud from my last blog is as relevant as ever. I hear many of the same words repeated now, if only in a cacophony of accents from These Islands.  To some people, my natural self is the sweetest, most helpful, and friendliest person in their lives, and to others, the exact same version of myself is a fundamentally unlikeable person.

Last week, I was confronted by a couple of people in my new life who said that I was among other things, ‘course, abrasive, blunt, and ‘clearly well educated’ (which was somehow said in a tone that was definitely an insult—I guess that is the adult version of “know-it-all’). When I got home from that conversation, I crawled into my bed and cried. After so long of being exactly myself and being told again that my mere existence was, once again, too much, I was tired and so I cried. I cried and cried and cried. My boyfriend held me in his arms as I sobbed, the same way I sobbed twenty years ago when I was really bullied for the first time in elementary school. The next day, I had a pint with a few other people from my new life, and everything about myself that the previous people berated me for, these folks explicitly said that they loved me for.

So here I am, in rural Scotland, in a village nearly as small as the town that I grew up in (and ran away from).  Somehow, despite everything, I am exactly where I am meant to be, and I think I might be exactly who I am meant to be.

I have moved to a completely new place, where nobody knows anything about me three times. I have completely started over with a new town, new community, and new career, THREE TIMES. For whatever reason, everywhere I have been there are a handful of people who decide they hate me for no real reason other than that I take up space and that I exist. However, there are also people who at once cherish my presence. None, of that is new.

On Sunday, my boyfriend and I settled onto a bench by the loch and stared up at the mountains around us. We had a check-in conversation about our first two weeks in this new place, how we felt about the community and the life we could build here; we discussed the positives and the negatives. I explained that my life in Philadelphia was everything I wanted at the time, I was perfectly content even with my small challenges and the plethora of potholes ruining the shocks in my car. At the end of each day, I was fundamentally happy with the life I had built there—I have the journal entries to prove it too!—and while this remote village in the Highlands of Scotland might not have much in common with Philly on the surface, something about it has made me perfectly and utterly content in a way I could never have expected. Regardless of the couple of people who made me cry last week, I can see a rich life of meaningful friendships and laughter. Despite their vast differences, both places bring me the peace that I have wanted all my life. He told me that he was the happiest he had ever been as well. Then, I felt the air shift and I knew the rain was coming. So, we meandered our way back to our flat.  Windswept and hair askew we entered our new shared home, with the plan for an afternoon nap, and as I cosied into the blankets, I knew this would be home for a long time to come. So… Yesterday, I bought a record player.

How people influence our place and motivations.

If I am candid, I have had an incredibly difficult time writing this final installment of my Influencers blog series. I created an infuriatingly vague prompt when I chose the title, How People Influence our Place and Motivations. It is not that I have had writer’s block, quite the opposite actually. I have had so many people influence my life for both good and for ill, that I had no idea what to choose for this blog entry.

Pride, Spite, Deceit, Love and Devotion, Loathing, Compassion. There are so many visceral ways our relationships with others can affect the course of our lives. There are moments in time where I look back—with almost no effort at all—close my eyes and find myself back in the experience of the memory. Sometimes, the memory is lovely, and I would gladly relive it a million times. Other times, I wish I could forget them.

One of the lovely memories that springs to mind happened on a chilly winter evening away from home when I was in high school. Some friends from another school and I had gone to a conference in southern Minnesota. Much to our delight, the hotel had a pool. I was so nervous about swimming. My swimsuit was not particularly cute or fashionable, and one of the people on the trip was a boy I had been flirting back and forth with for months. Every insecurity that could possibly be in the mind of a sixteen-year-old girl around a boy she likes was whirling through my head. He was also one of my best friends outside of school, so my mind was calculating how I would get out of this situation without humiliating myself. I remember, at one point, our other friends had gone back to our rooms. We were alone for the first time on this trip. We talked and laughed and flirted. I eventually found myself in his arms in the pool, and we were spinning in the water. We spun and spun and spun, my heart was soaring. That moment in the water was everything to me. This was the first time I ever felt like someone thought I was beautiful or worthy of romantic interest.

Nearly a year after that, we did finally date for a couple of months. I was too self-conscious to be open with my family about my relationship, and we broke up three weeks before prom, but that is a story for another day. I decided to share that story because it happened eight years after the first time someone called me fat to my face. It took eight years to feel worthy of love, and like my body wasn’t a negative piece of me.

The first time someone called me fat was on the playground in third grade. I doubt the bully even remembers that it happened. That is the thing about trauma and bullying though, often something said in malice will fundamentally change the way you see the world around you, but for the abuser, it is just another sentence that leaves the mind as soon as they receive the reaction they crave. I doubt she remembers her passing eight-year-old snark, but I do. That is a life-long influence. I remember with perfect clarity laying in my dark bedroom, sobbing and begging my mother not to make me go back to school the next day. I am a person who has loved school from the very beginning, but the mean words from one little girl made me dread it. I remember choosing to wear nothing but sweatsuits to school for the next two years until my father outlawed my baggy fleece armor. I remember being “modest,” but it was not modesty brought on by my changing body; it was modesty to hide my “fatness.”

Only a handful of people have ever called me “fat,” and most of them have been internet trolls. I do not usually take it to heart. However, to this day, I hear the shrill voice of my third-grade bully. I hear her when I shop for jeans and ballgowns; I hear her when I buy shoes or sit at the Thanksgiving table. That memory always immerses me. I don’t look back on it with the wisdom of an adult woman who has worked through that trauma. I live that memory, and I hear it with the ears of an eight-year-old little girl.

It would take until that day in the pool with the boy I liked, eight years later, for me to feel okay about my body. Those two people will likely never meet, and yet they influenced me profoundly, but in completely opposite ways. That’s the thing, isn’t it? People and the words they speak have so much power. We want to believe the age-old nursery adage, “Words will never hurt me,” but we aren’t fooling ourselves. Words and actions both matter.

I know what people say about me. I always have. I know what my high school nemesis said in the hallways; I know what my freshman roommate thought of me at the time. I could hear the whispers from the mean girls on the other side of the classroom in Graduate School. I know what my employers thought about my work ethic and my desire to lead. I know what professors thought of me. I see the snide looks from across the table at high school reunions. I also see the smiles from the people I help and the familiarity of passing friendship from bodega workers when I walk through the door. I know, I see, I hear, but the thing is… every negative in one person’s eyes is a positive in another’s.

I will let you in on a little secret. Even though I had many friends in school, I still listen to Mean by Taylor Swift whenever I am about to cross into Polk County, Minnesota, or attend an alumni event for grad school. Part of me is ashamed to admit it, but the fact of the matter is, some of what motivates me is spite. I am not fuelled by exorbitant amounts of spite, but it does not change the fact that spite is in the equation of influences. Do not get me wrong, I absolutely wish the best for everyone I have ever met; I harbor minimal ill will. Still, part of me is propelled by the knowledge that I am achieving all my goals despite what people from my past said about me. Until COVID, I was living the life I always wanted without caveats, and I know that I will continue to thrive in a post-pandemic world.

I am also fuelled by pride. I have often said, “if everyone has a deadly sin, mine is Pride.” I work incredibly hard to be best at everything I do, and I am proud of my accomplishments. I am proud that I have “shown the haters,” and I am proud of my progress. I am not a very humble person. Pride, for me, is not just me being proud of myself. I strive and work hard so other people can be proud of me too. I want the women in my life who have sacrificed for me to be proud of me. I want my high school history teacher to share in the pride of my lecturing to thousands of people about our nation’s founding. I want my grandfather to be proud of me. I want my nieces to see that anything is possible. Pride and Pressure go hand-in-hand because my pride is not mine alone.

We are now 1300 words into this blog post and 5000 words into this series. I have written about growing up, communities, Pride and Spite, Loathing, Love and Devotion, and the choices we make. I could spend a million words on all the ways people influence our lives and motivations. I am going to end this blog series with my thoughts on lying and deceit. While it is not a happy subject to end on, it is also the largest force for change in my life.

I am a radically honest person, and I am fiercely loyal. I seldom lie and will defend those I love in private quarrels and public squares. I believe that broken promises and spilled secrets are grave betrayals, and as a result, I have been known to hold grudges. I have also been known to take the wrong side in a battle because I believed the lies of people I thought were allies. Lies are the one thing I cannot tolerate in any relationship, whether the deceit comes from a significant other, friend, or family member.

Every major social shift I have experienced has resulted from me believing the lies people told me. A friend of mine lied to me in seventh grade to hide her mistake, I took the wrong side, and by the time the truth came out, I lost some of my best friends. My homelife growing-up was an environment of deceit and betrayal. My college boyfriend lied to me—a lot. The reason I moved to Philadelphia alone in 2018 was the result of uncovering a lie and leaving. The reason I ended my engagement was that I realized I had been lying to myself.

Deceit influences us in so many ways. The worst part is we do not even know it is happening half of the time. When the deception is active, we are being moved and manipulated without our knowledge or consent. Then, if—or when—we uncover the deceit, we are moved, shifted, and influenced again. Influence through deception is the worst kind of influence. You can go to therapy. You can heal from trauma and move passed the bullies and the parental issues. Sometimes, we can even answer the real question, “Why am I like this?” We can heal from the lies that have already affected us, but then we have to make a choice. When do you trust again? Who is worthy of your trust? Will this person influence me and deceive me?

Maybe I am the fool. I often begin from a place of trust, even though so many people around me have lied. I know the number of times this deceit, manipulation, and uncovering cycle has influenced my life trajectory. I am wary of trusting, but I do not want past villains’ lies to influence my view of society. Maybe it should? If I let that happen, deceit will continue to influence my life without my consent, and I know I do not want that to happen.

So, how do people influence our outlook, place, and motivation? Well, in short, words and actions matter. Sometimes we are motivated by wanting to be “better than” or to prove ourselves. Sometimes escape is the motivation. Sometimes everything and everyone in your life until this moment is why you react the way you do.

In 2016, I moved to Philadelphia. I moved because I always wanted to escape my small town; I wanted to make my family proud. I wanted to show the bullies back home how great my life would be, and I was running away from issues I had with my high-school homelife.

When I moved back to Minnesota, it was because my boss closed down the theatre I was working at, I was out of money, my boyfriend wasn’t contributing to our cost of living, and my sister had just had brain surgery.

In 2018, I applied to graduate school a year earlier than I had planned and moved to Philadelphia alone. I did that because I uncovered a web of lies my boyfriend had been spinning for years. I was looking for a way out of my relationship, I missed my friends, and I hated Minnesota for all reasons I had left in the first place.

Now it is 2020, and I am back in Minnesota. I finally ended my bad relationship, I have a graduate degree, and somehow achieved every “Do by 25” goal I set for myself. I am in Minnesota because of the Pandemic. The pandemic was spread by people.

I have moved roughly 5,000 miles in the last five years. Each time was a choice that I made, but those choices were educated by people around me and their influences from my past, present, and future. I have been motivated and influenced in big and small ways from the day I was born. No one exists in a vacuum. We share this world, and every action you take influences someone. Sometimes in small ways, like choosing which direction the toilet paper belongs on the holder. Sometimes in significant ways, like making them feel seen and important for the first time. Pride, Spite, Love, Devotion, Loathing, Compassion, Deceit, all those things come down to Commonality.

People influence our lives because we are never alone. The ghosts from our past and the people waiting for us will always affect us. Words, actions, proximity, and relationships influence us whether we like it or not. Therapy, mindfulness, and processing our trauma becomes critical to understanding why we are the way we are because our pain rarely sprouts organically from ourselves. The Sticks and Stonesnursery rhyme is essential to hold on to because we want our children to stand strong against cruelty. I think maybe growing up is realizing the lyrics should read, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words and manipulation might hurt me too.”

When we attempt to Build our Communities as Young Adults

Humans are social creatures who are psychologically wired to create connections. We want to function in groups because we cannot provide or achieve all that is needed for a well-rounded life by ourselves; we have a fundamental need to belong. This is where finding community and creating a community for one’s self becomes critical, and one of the reasons the COVID-19 pandemic is psychologically devastating to so many of us. Members of our communities are dying, being displaced, and we have been removed from the intrinsic communities formed by co-workers and classmates. Maintaining our communities suddenly takes a lot of work, and emotional isolation creeps up and removes our communities as we tire of Zoom Meetings and text messages. In part two of my Influencers blog series, I have been dissecting my old communities and discovering how they influenced the creation of my close friends and found family community as a young adult. How do we create our community, who gets in, who stays, who goes? How did I figure out my need for community?

Often our friends and community members become a part of our lives by circumstance or proximity. During childhood, when a group of peers is placed in a room with you—eight hours per day, five days per week for thirteen years—groups will form, and friendships will develop. Making friends is easy, right? Then, you go to summer camp, vacation bible study, youth community theatre, or swimming lessons. You have friends there because their parents sent them to these summer activities too. Then we get our first jobs—in my case, I worked primarily with schoolmates—we make friends there because we are spending hours and hours each week making tacos, cashiering at the gas station, or stocking shelves, together. Always together. Are these people who you consider your friends, people you would have chosen for your community if you had not been forced together? Does that matter?

The first time many of us are given a chance to curate our friend groups comes after secondary school. Those who attend a trade school, start to work right out of high school, or who attend university all must figure out how to build a community. I went to university right after high school, so those are the experiences I can speak to here. University subdivides people into an infinite number of groups that create pools of people one can choose as a predetermined community. There are dorm floors, clubs, majors, classes, study groups, learning communities, sports teams, radio stations. Take your pick, or choose a bunch. Either way, these are places we can find friends with little effort.

My attempts at finding a community:

Freshman year of college placed me in a few groups that set me up for tight communities and close friendships. I was a member of 2013’s Smart Start—an early move-in program run by the university’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion— where I moved into the dorms a week early and attended classes and activities with two dozen other students throughout the school. I lived in the Honors’ Learning Community with a few other members of the honors program. I lived in the dorms—communal bathrooms will cause bonding whether you like it or not— and I was a theatre major. When I went to university, I was one of three people from my graduating class to attend MSUM, so there was a piece of my old community there too. So many options and this is before we even consider classes or cafeteria lines that could form friendships. How do we choose? I initially threw myself into my Smart Start Community and my honors program community. Both of these communities were forged through us being stuck in the same place for long periods, and most of the honors and Smart Start people lived in my dorm building, so we were around each other and had similar things to complain about or people to talk about. In fact, my college boyfriend lived on my dorm floor. Would I have chosen him if he were not around all the time and interested in me? Probably not.

The first deliberate community choice that I remember being made in college happened when I ran into a high school classmate in the Student Union during orientation week. We were both surprised to see each other. We chatted a bit, but I was waiting for my friends, and she was sitting with her new college friends. We had considered each other close friends all through primary school and high school, but at that moment, we realized we were not those kids anymore. At first, I felt the pain and rejection of the situation but then realized that we were finding ourselves, and we might no longer be the slumber party, boy talk, complain about teachers, kind of friends anymore. That is okay. I went to her wedding a few years later, we see each other at reunions and are faithful “likers” on Instagram, and we are still friends, but she was not a part of my undergrad community.

Later on in college, I dropped the honors program because I wanted to graduate early, then I moved out of the dorms. My community became almost exclusively the University Theatre Department. One of the joys of studying and working in theatre is that no matter where you are or what company you work for, the interpersonal dynamics are similar. A cast party with college theatre artists will have people behaving exactly the same as a cast party with people in their fifties or sixties—except the alcohol is more expensive and the snacks are better—because we have the same passion. We choose our position in the industry because of who we are. Our casts and crews are selected by the directors or administration, and we suddenly spend hundreds of hours together over an incredibly short period of time. This is another community created by circumstance and proximity. The crucible of a production calendar will forge relationships. When you add the pressures of testing, grades, and group projects, a theatre major multiplies the potential for community building.

After I graduated from my bachelor’s program, I decided to pack up my entire life and move to Philadelphia, PA. I did not know anyone there, I did not really have a plan; I just knew it was where I needed to be at that moment in time. I told my boyfriend that I was moving, and he could come with me, or we could break up. I was ready to go alone. In the end, he joined me, but he did not participate in the world with me. At twenty years old, I was virtually alone in a city of 1.6 million people. This was when I realized the value of a community.

After eighteen days of being jobless and alone in Philadelphia, I was hired at The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre (Philly Shakes) as an Assistant Stage Manager for their 2016 productions of Macbeth and Twelfth Night. The dynamics of a theatre troupe were something I was familiar with, and every day I am grateful for the people who became my first found family in Philadelphia. The work was hard, the hours were long, and I was so incredibly poor, but I was not alone. These are the people who threw my 21st Birthday party and made Philadelphia home, and yet I still had not actually built this family. It was a community I was hired into. Then, I left Philadelphia the first time.

In the years between leaving Philadelphia and moving back to Philly in 2018, I was more alone than ever. I was still in a relationship with my college boyfriend, but we were unhappy and growing apart. I would spend holidays with friends from college or my family. For a while, we lived with my mother in her new town. I worked for theatres, news stations, event centers, department stores, and an escape room—all without a chosen community, no drinks after work, no hourlong phone calls, alone.

How do we create a community?

Each of the communities I have been a part of has affected me in profound ways, and they educate the community I find myself in today. Nobody is part of just one community. There are rings of intimacy and sincerity in communities. I have blog readers and work friends, I have college friends, I have colleagues, I have graduate school friends, I have my biological family, I have a found family, and many more. We are who we spend time with, overt and covert peer pressures are real, and humans do not want to be alone. Therefore our communities are essential, and why we must take care in choosing them.

How do we choose who to let into our most cherished communities? Do we let in the co-worker who remembers our coffee order? Do we keep our lab partners or the girl who watches our laundry when we run to the vending machine at the launder mat? The answer depends; yes, no, maybe, I do not know yet? Creating a community is one of the most important tasks of our lives, and yet no one can teach us how to do it. Movies and magazines have been showing me how to secure a husband for as long as I can remember, but the nuclear family is a relatively recent construct, and we yearn for communities that are more than just a spouse and 2.5 children.

An unexpectedly tricky part of building communities is not only choosing who to let into your inner circle but choosing who to remove. The latter difficulty is a skill that keeps us up at night. Deciding when to end a relationship or friendship is hard. It is hard because we want to be accepted, it is hard because we do not want to die alone, it is hard because change is scary. The friendships that fizzle out and grow apart are sad to lose, but the relationships that we choose to end cannot be summed up so easily.

I have an amazing biological family—who create an intrinsic community for me— but I want to end this blog talking about some of the communities I have built for myself.

The first community I built consists of a handful of friends from undergrad who I consider my family. They are people who knew me when I was running on 3 hours of sleep and drinking orange Mountain Dew to get through my 20 hour days. They include the first two apartment roommates I ever had, a brilliant writer, excellent road trip buddies, and one of the most amazing dancers I have ever seen. We have Zoom costume parties and get together for New Year’s Eve. They are people who have seen me at my worst and my best; they tell me, “I told you so,” when I make bad choices, and I pick them up when they need me. We are a family.

The second community is the one I built in Philadelphia. This community is not as homogenous as the first, but I know that each of these people is one of ” my people.” The first is a single mom who began as a co-worker at Philly Shakes. 2016

at the theatre was really hard on all of us, and she and I became very close through the theatrical crucible that I mentioned earlier in this piece. When I moved back to Philadelphia, I wasn’t working for the theatre, but I wanted to reconnect with my old community, and she was the first person who welcomed me back. In the last four and half years of our friendship, we have talked each other through some very ugly breakups. I have cared for her after emergency surgery, helped throw her daughter’s birthday party, attended Phillies games, driven to the airport, driven carpool, had birthday drinks, and so much more. She was added to my community through proximity the first time, but the second time we chose each other.

Then, there are my friends from graduate school. The next few members of my Philadelphia community were found through my master’s program at Drexel University. I met the first at orientation, she seemed a bit serious and uppity at the time, but we were at the same table. I got to know her a bit and left it at that. A couple of days later, I met a young woman in my program who lived up the street from me and offered her a ride home after a late-night fringe show. She expressed an interest in working in the same industry as the first woman I had met a few days ago. I introduced them. These two women became my friends very quickly for a few reasons. One, we seemed to be only people who had work experience before graduate school—that later turned out to be an incorrect impression. Two, we had all moved from out west to be there, and three, we genuinely seemed to like each other. Since our meeting, we have traveled to the Lodigaini Family home in Connecticut, had dinner with each other’s’ significant others, taken cemetery tours, and sent one of us back to Texas to work in auctions, just like she wanted that first day we met. I have hung mirrors, checked basements for ghosts, had countless dinners and happy hours with these women, and proofread more copy that I can remember.

I think the thing that creates my community is that we share. We share joys, we share hardship, we share bottles of wine and orders of fries. We can be exactly who we are at all times. I have always been quick to accept someone into my life. I was the first person to introduce myself to new kids in high school, and I can break the ice in any room, but the thing that lets people into my community is the ability to share in the chaos that is life. The first friend I made in grad school became my friend because he told me he did not know how to make potatoes. He was alone in a new country, nervous about starting school, and he did not know how to make potatoes. We became fast friends, I helped him through our grad program, and he kept a smile on my face. I wrote a blog a few months ago about being a helper, and I think that is where the basis for my community resides as well. Share your trials with me, and I will help where I can. Let me lean on you, and know that you are there. Life is invariably short, no matter how long our lives might be. I believe the need for community stems from a want to share our lives with people around us. Now, if only we could all figure out how to do that…

Part III: How People influence our place and Motivations Coming October 2020

Bloomberg Released an op-ed last week that discusses the complexities of loneliness in young people, compound that with watching Normal People on Hulu—which is very NSFW do not watch it with your family—this week, the release of Stephanie Meyer’s Midnight Sun, and Taylor Swift’s folklore [sic], I have been reflecting a great deal about people from the different eras of my life. Not only the people who have most affected my life, like parents and siblings, but also childhood best friends, celebrities, high school frenemies, bodega men, and baristas. Maybe it is the result of quarantine or my newfound singledom, maybe it is because I spent fifty-two days without touching another living being then thirty-six days without a moment of solitude when I fled the city for my mother’s house the first time—back when we Americans still hoped we would have COVID under control by July—whatever the reason, I am beginning to realize how every person and every moment in my life enriches the next. My dear friend Fiona once told me that I, “live the most self-examined life” of anyone she had ever met. So, in that spirit, I will be exploring the influences of my community members in three parts. Part I: The Effects of a Shared Childhood, Part II: When we attempt to Build our Communities as Young Adults, Part III: How People Influence our Place and Motivations.

Part I: The Effects of a Shared Childhood

The first of these freezeframe moments came a few weeks ago. On the most beautiful July 18th to ever occur, my childhood best friend got married on her family’s property; I had been heart-wrenchingly nervous about it. I was worried about COVID and masks, I was worried about what people from back home might say about my canceled engagement, I was worried about whether my dress was too low cut. I almost did not go, in fact, on July 17th I had resolved not to go. Until my dental-hygienist asked how I was doing, and for some reason, I told her every reservation I had about attending the wedding. Why did I tell her any of these fears? I have no idea, but I did. Forty-five minutes later, I left the dentist with a new toothbrush and the fundamental understanding that I would never forgive myself if I missed my best friend’s wedding.

The moment the bride stepped out of her front door and my eyes began to well with tears, I could not imagine not being there. Come September, she and I will have known each other for twenty-one years, she is as much a part of my identity as any of my siblings—no matter how different our families may seem. She tied my shoes for four years when this very left-handed little girl could not figure it out. I spoke-up where she could not. I do not know what I taught her, or what influence I have had on her. I may never know, but I do know the unending influence she and her family have had on me. She was not the only person I saw that day that made me teary to see. Having come from Philadelphia, I stuck to the outskirts of the ceremony, and the reception. I would never forgive myself if I carried COVID into this community that helped raise me. One guest of the grooms would not let me be lonely though. He wanted to know all about my work in historic sites and had question after question about the founding of the country, then I sat down to eat alone so I would not be unmasked around anyone vulnerable.

During dinner, I looked up and heard a remarkably familiar grumble of, “Soto.” The bride’s older brother was acknowledging me the way he always had. I think, one is always ten years old in the eyes of the older siblings of a childhood friend. Her aunt came and demanded a hug and her mother beamed at me, it does not matter how long I have been gone or how far I run these people are a part of me.

This July 18th wedding reminded me of the wedding of another childhood friend four years ago. I was just about to move back to Minnesota from Philadelphia the first time—due to another inexplicable crumbling of my life—and in the middle of the reception surrounded with the community of my childhood I realized how loved I was back home and that everything would be okay. Each person at these weddings helped create the person I am, some more directly than others. These people include the woman who makes the best monster cookies in the world, the couple who not only gave me my first job but more support than I could have ever expected from a classmate’s parents, my high school FACS teacher, and a handful of other childhood friends who were graced with growing up in our strange little community.

As children, we do not get to choose our community. In small-town Minnesota, you do not really get to choose your childhood friends either, but I find I am extremely lucky that my parents landed me where they did. In a graduating class of nineteen people—most of whom have been in school together since PRE-K—you know a few things. You know that when high school comes around you absolutely must date people from other schools because the twelve kids you’ve known since you were four years old are your siblings, we know every embarrassing thing about first-grade birthday parties, fifth-grade spelling bees, and that time… oh never mind we don’t talk about it. We know that some of us will stay in our hometown and send their kids to our school, some of us will leave and come back, some of us will run far away and visit for holidays and reunions and some of us will never come back. We also know, Mrs. Winter will make you watch A Walk to Remember and it will make everyone cry in English Class, we know that Connie will be in the stands for every Patriot sporting event until the end of time, we know the sound of the pebbles crunching underfoot in the playground, and that is something special.

I have no idea how often the people from back home think about me or our shared past, but I hope they know how much I celebrate and mourn with every moment of their lives. I keep up with every professional volleyball team Erica signs with each year, I fret and rejoice for the pregnancies of the women I grew up with, I listen to Austin’s music, I cheer Kylee’s academic pursuits—for some reason, we both seem to always be going back to school—I wonder about the silent friends, Elena and I share pictures of the kittens we’ve adopted. I hope they all know that while life moves on, I am still there for them because they are a part of who I am.

To Be Continued…

Part II: When we attempt to Build our Communities as Young Adults

Above: A photo of the bride and Michelle in 2003.

The last blog I wrote was written in the early days of quarantine, I had only been laid off for a month and a half, and we all hoped the world go back to normal by mid-May. My-oh-my were we wrong… I have now been laid off for more than three months, and nothing about my life is the same as it was on March 14th—when I last closed the Burial Ground at Christ Church Philadelphia.

I truly and deeply loved everything about my life on March 14th. I was lucky enough to have two jobs that I loved and a tight-knit family of co-workers. I had just completed my master’s degree from Drexel University and was interviewing for full-time positions up and down the Eastern Seaboard. I had a beautiful apartment 200 feet in the air overlooking the largest city park in the country. My friends and I were meeting for happy hour and going to museums, exhibits, and tours around the city nearly every weekend. Everything about my life in Philadelphia was exactly what I wanted it to be, and the world was my oyster.

Then, COVID-19 shut down the country and it all changed. Nothing about my life today is what I was expecting it to be three months ago. The entire arts and culture industry has collapsed and there are hundreds of thousands of people just like me trying to figure out where to go next.

The lease for my aerie apartment ended this month, and I find myself once again in uncertain waters. With no way of knowing when the global health crisis will end or when Museums or Theatres will start hiring again, I decided to put nearly all of my belongings into storage and wait to see what the rest of 2020 has to throw at me.

Some mornings, I wake up angry. I am angry at everything 2020 has taken from humanity, from my friends, our families, and me. Some days I am anxious; how will I progress toward my goals when the world is shut down, when will the state finally process my unemployment, when will people of color and members of the LGBTQ2IA+ community be safe from persecution, when will I feel safe enough to go to the grocery store, what new horrible thing will happen this month? But most mornings, I wake up grateful. I am grateful to be alive, I am grateful that my vulnerable family members are safe and healthy, I am grateful that I had three months of savings to get me through the end of my lease.

On my last night in Philadelphia, I had dinner at a friend’s house in Queen Village. We talked about the world, our anxiety and rage at 2020, and all the little pieces of our lives. I stopped in Old City on the way and took some photos because I did not know when—or if—would be coming home. There is nowhere in the world like Philadelphia on the Fourth of July, and my heart aches to not be in the city, not only this weekend but every day I am not there. I do not know if I will ever live there again. I want to. I want to bake cupcakes for the birthday parties my found family throws, I want to talk to people from around the world about Mary Andrews, Deborah Franklin, and Annis Stockton, I want to visit with the farmers at my weekly market, but that is no longer possible. It is difficult to know what will be possible in the coming months or years. So, I decided not to sign a new lease and to wait.

Not being tied into a lease means that I can take a job anywhere. With jobs in my industry being scarce and sporadic, living a nomadic life in the guestrooms of my family members’ homes seemed like the best possible way to find a job. I can be anywhere I need to be in 2 days and having family and friends around the country means no matter where I find employment, I can start right away.

I still do not know what is next, but today, I write to you from my brother’s dining room table in Ypsilanti, Michigan. My new kitten and I are sitting next to my six-year-old nephew, as he works on a Spiderman coloring book and tells me about every car he has ever seen. This is not the Independence Day Weekend I expected, but I am starting to be okay with that.

So, even though the pieces of my old life make me want to be in Philadelphia this weekend, I am fine coloring scenes of Spiderman and Mary-Jane, re-arranging my goals for a COVID-19 ravaged America, and helping my brother install his new gazebo.

This is not the life I expected to have, but it is a pretty good life all the same.

P.s. If you need a guest lecturer or tutor let me know because my unemployment is STILL messed up.

My name is Michelle Soto and welcome to my blog! Starting a blog feels like doing ice breakers at Freshman Orientation, so I am going to assume you are on board and tell you a bit about me.

The first fun fact I will share is that I am a sucker for turning my name into a portmanteau. So, in this blog entry, you will find me as a “Michelper” and October is “Michalloween!”

The first serious fact I will share is this…

While my passions and professional direction point toward Historic Sites and History Museums, I have worked in Theatre, Printing, Sales, Hospitality, Tourism, Historic Sites, and Land Preservation. I am one of those people who “wears many hats.”

I want to help the organizations I serve to be the strongest organizations possible. I currently hold two positions. I am a Historic Site Guide at Christ Church Preservation Trust, and the Digital Marketing Manager at The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre. At Christ Church I am an educator, but I also helped establish a new admission policy; I take marketing photos and help other members of the staff update their language to be more accessible to all visitors. I can ask if a visitor would like a copy of our information in French, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Spanish because I want to help them too! I have worked with The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre off and on since 2016, and a member of our board recently joked that I had held more titles than any other staff member. I have held many titles because I have a diverse skill set, and I am willing to use it to strengthen the organization. Today, I am a Digital Marketer, which means I am the person who runs a majority of our Social Media Accounts, I admin their blog and Constant Contact email campaigns, but I also help run auditions, I fix broken printers and broken Excel Equations. I also occasionally make 200 bite-sized pumpkin pies from scratch for donor events.

My Master’s Thesis is about how organizational identity affects the presentation of content concerning accessibility and inclusivity because I believe wholeheartedly that the answers to our questions lie in analyzing our shared experiences and bringing people together. I am sure there will be a blog on that sometime in the near future, but for now, please know I want to help.

This introductory blog is the first of many! You can expect project updates, blog posts about my research, and the adventures I take.

In the meantime feel free to follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram!