Change in Handwriting

So, I'm moving across the world? On rejection, redirection, and the beauty in the unexpected. A sequel to a (kind of) depressing chapter of personal writing.

It was the first thing I woke up to on Thursday morning and one of the final things my eyes examined over before bed, reliving the initial moment: that hybrid state of disbelief and unbridled joy. It served as a mantra, sending me into my unconscious mental cave with reassurance that there was not only a light at the end of the tunnel, but a tunnel in the first place. I cried, too, despite my joy. Waterworks don’t discriminate as you oscillate between rejection and acceptance, apparently.

Getting into Trinity College was one of those life moments that doesn’t feel real until the anxiety kicks in (which I can assure you it now has). I couldn’t quite compute or process it. When I was five, I tripped over my dog’s leash and knocked out my front tooth. The shock that followed — perched on a table at Crissy Field with blood dripping down my face and a ringing in my ears, yet not an ounce of pain — felt like this. In a good way, though. It was a smack in the face that knocked me out of a months-long mental haze brought on by getting rejected from a school (I thought) I was destined to go to.

As I committed the memory to writing in my diary, I leafed through the pages containing the near-daily musings I had been taking down since summer. I noted — as I always do — the change in handwriting over the months. Seeing it (and reading it) used to fill me with an odd sensation; not quite nostalgia and not quite melancholy, but a mixture of both (and a pit in the stomach). That day, examining the change made me smile.

From: “Fuck you, Barnard” to “Thank you, Barnard” in a matter of months, it’s funny to watch this truly full circle (and wildly unexpected) Paris Geller-esque moment in my life unfold (it also helped that I learned the extent of their institutional corruption).

I used to repeat the words of comfort given to me by teachers and college counselors: “Rejection is redirection,” with a forced level of sincerity, but now I believe it. Eye-roll worthy, I know, but for once I have very little to complain about (and self-identifying as a writer has never been harder). I feel like this was — and I mean it in the corniest way possible, thank you very much — truly meant to be. After having my confidence torn from me at rejection, I entered a kind of creative and social coma. Days blurred into one another, without anything to look to or work toward. In the last diary entry, before my acceptance, I said:

“Everything right now seems to be at a standstill, like my future hangs in the balance of a deer and a hunter that have come face to face, anxiously anticipating even a slight movement from the other. I just need something to happen — something unexpected — that makes me connect pen to paper again with furious purpose.”

Ironically, I wasn’t banking on getting into Trinity at this point. So much so that I — out of getting my hopes too high up the last time — didn’t allow myself to consider the possibility. Typically, I am not the “don’t get your hopes up kind of girl” (fuck that) but seeing as I didn’t even see Dublin as a possibility in my future, the feeling of having that tunnel constructed, and that golden light painted along the horizon at its end, was what made me connect pen to paper again in. I wrote an entire scholarship essay that night and relished it, purely for the sensation that dancing my fingers across a keyboard with a purpose brought.

Going from feeling like my life was at a standstill to having a concrete plan involving moving across the world in 6 months was… an oscillation between two extremes, to say the least. But I think I needed that, in a way; to be pushed into something completely new and frankly terrifying, but adventurous. As a writer, it was the most spontaneous (some might say reckless) yet smartest decision I could have made, as most quests for inspiration tend to be.

I flicked further back in my diary entries. Biden dropping out of the Presidential race (and Harris joining it), Trump getting elected (and the shitshow that followed), and a myriad of social entanglements I had since wiped — or let organically fade — from my mind. Without realizing it, I set myself up for a presidential term-length escape from a country going up in flames (and whose Department of Education is being dismantled as we speak) and a chapter not concluded, but soon to be paused, in the Bay Area for another, elsewhere.

I suppose it all goes to show that Noel was right and it’s best not to Look Back in Anger. Being able to fondly read diary entries where your handwriting was more round, took up more (or less) space on the page, and wrote about dreams not gone, but simply that have found new form, is beautiful — like the letters we wrote to our future selves in the different stages of childhood and adolescence. Being able to embrace change and exhilarate oneself with the unknown is a power unlike any other.

Let your handwriting change.