My general psychology class is in a lecture hall on the second floor of a classroom building – a college-campus staple of a building filled with rooms and hallways lined with vending machines. My class is in the late afternoon, hours after my only other class that day. It’s a gen ed, so rarely more than a quarter of the kids in the class actually show up. It’s still exponentially bigger than my theatre classes, and I love the anonymity that it affords.
That second-floor hallway is capped at either end with huge bay windows, with just enough of a nook for me to sit with my large coconut caramel coffee and catch up on work. I can look out and see one of the central malls of the school, lined with clubs handing out flyers, people playing Frisbee with their dogs, people walking to class.
Today there are bouncy houses. I’m not sure why they’re there, but it looks like fun.
I sit in this nook to get some space. It’s bright and open but quiet, and I am alone. It’s easier to think, to write, and to work here.
Now, in this last week of classes, there is plenty of work to be done, but for the moment I’m sitting in the sun and thinking about this semester.
My birthday was last week.
I don’t really like my birthday. I mean, I don’t dislike it; I like being celebrated and I like feeling loved, like any normal human. But I am wary of the attention, I guess, and the fact that it makes me very aware of my mortality. The day doesn’t need to be special.
Nineteen is weird. It doesn’t sit well in my mouth, it doesn’t feel like me just yet. Looking at myself at nineteen feels like trying on a just-too-big dress in a department store: it’s cute, but a little too long and the waist doesn’t sit right. It’s the right size, I guess, but it’s still not flattering.
It’s a tremendously unremarkable year, caught between the fading power-drunkenness of eighteen and the honest adulthood of alcohol-drinking, stock-buying, and run-for-office-ing twenty-one. I’m still a teenager, but it’s not quite as cool as it was last year.
For some reason, I find myself thinking about a song lyric. Stephen Sondheim, my favorite musical theatre writer, wrote a show called Sunday in the Park with George. It’s about many things, but it spends a lot of time dwelling on artists and their relationship to their art. The idea is encapsulated in a song called “Finishing the Hat,” in which the main character George agonizes over the fact that he must finish his painting. He must finish the hat, even though life is passing him by and he is losing things and people he loves dearly.
It tears him apart, but it’s so much of who he is he can’t not. “Look, I made a hat/where there never was a hat,” he sings at the end.
The phrase, among the people familiar with the show and its meaning, has taken to be, “I created something. It was hard, but I did it.”
Hats are tedious things.
I’m in a class this semester for which I need to build things. In a shop. With saws and pneumatic staplers and tape measures.
If you know me at all, you know those things do not come naturally to me. They are awkward and somewhere between my brain and my hands something gets lost.
But I made some hats. They are not necessarily pretty, or even, or flush, or square, or straight, but I made them.
Some days, the word “disabled” stings a little bit more than usual. Some days, my sarcastic and occasionally sardonic joking is probably more to cover pain than it is to apologize for being unhelpful or in the way. I don’t talk about that much. There are not answers to questions I don’t even know how to ask.
But still, I finished those hats.
The song is about art, so I guess I’m a writer, and should talk about the piles of unfinished drafts and discarded ideas and contextless phrases that taunt and frustrate me.
And maybe there’s some truth to that, but there are so many words I’d use to describe myself before “writer.” Words like friend, or student, or believer. Adjectives like kind and honest and loving are all things I would hope I could list as more intrinsically part of me than my love of and skill with words.
And I think life on the whole is a lot like Sondheim’s hat. If you focus too hard on one thing, you kind of lose track of the rest of it. I suppose a side of that looks like righteous passion, but there’s also one that looks like anger and resentment.
Let this be an acknowledgement that life is hard, but let’s not get hung up on the hats.
There have been days I haven’t gotten a whole lot of sleep.
I have worked on the stage of one of the major theaters in the area. The one the gets all the Broadway shows. I have run around a building carrying boxes. I have done work spending time with a week-old friend group who made me laugh incessantly and were determined to set me up with a cute boy I met (nothing came of it). It’s a friend group I’ll miss, people I didn’t know I needed. They say you should surround yourself with people better than you. Sometimes that happens by accident.
I went to a concert. A concert I didn’t even know was happening until the day before. It was loud, so loud that the bass resounded in my chest and lodged itself in my throat to where I didn’t think I could breathe. The drums hurt my head and ears and face.
But it was sweeping and hopeful, and joyful, and almost symphonic, as much as a six-piece band playing in a club at 6:30pm can be. They’re one of my favorite bands, with lyrics that are honest, coated in layers of Narnia-esque storytelling, metaphor and allegory. True, literary, and rich.
It’s one of the bands I put on when the fear creeps up, the fear that lately feels like it’s permanently moved into my brain and settled into my bones. It’s hollow and heavy and uncomfortable, but truth is good. And screaming a song lyric just out of tune with a hundred other people is a good reminder that the truth doesn’t change when it’s late and you’re tired but can’t sleep.
I took a group of friends to get food that tastes like home. A home, one of many, I suppose, but the flavor that I most readily call familiar. A waiter who let me practice a language I haven’t spoken for years, who knew the area of town I used to live in, understood what I wanted and gave me a free order of one of my favorite foods. It was sweet. Where I’m from has no easy answer. Communicating home is hard, but showing a new group of people you love the correct way to eat Ethiopian food is one of the best ways I’ve found.
I have rubbed holes in jeans and worn through a pair of shoes plus the duct tape I patched them with. I have binged watched shows and procrastinated too much.
I have done poorly on assignments. I have broken promises, hurt people, fallen through and made plenty of mistakes.
I don’t always make my bed, or clean my room, or do my laundry often enough.
I have cried over the phone with old friends. I’ve cried in front of new friends.
These are all versions of hats, I think, to extend Sondheim’s metaphor to an extreme. Easy things to be consumed with – classes and school and relationships and fear and the fact that I need to vacuum. As Sondheim demonstrates, making and finishing hats requires sacrifice and work and sometimes it hurts.
That’s what life is. It’s full of work and sacrifice and sometimes it hurts.
It’s also just boring sometimes. Sometimes it’s just wake up, do the work, go to bed, repeat.
But, when you zoom out, past the hat and the person wearing the hat and look at the sprawling, gorgeous landscape as a whole, you’ll probably realize you created a beautiful thing.
And that’s worth celebrating.
Whatever the insignificance of nineteen, it’s still a milestone as much as any birthday. It feels like a surrogate for “the end of my first year of college,” another small victory that still makes me feel undeservedly grown-up, but also feel my own immaturity afresh.
But it is happening. Has happened. Is happening.
If life is a giant hat – or perhaps a painting full of hats, like one of those collages where a thousand different images make up a larger image, hats upon hats upon Sondheimian hats – then what a privilege it is to get to make it.
So, Um...Yeah 