Nothing was ending or beginning today. It rained and I walked through the woods and past houses. I talked to my mother over the phone and told her I was tired.

I’m tired because I feel like I’ve said too much. That none of it has been the right thing. I thought about attacking materialism again—I considered an assertion of the beatitudes. The whole thing could be brought to summation here, but details are better.

I told a friend I was scared everything was going to fall apart, right now, when it’s so close to closure.

“It won’t,” she said, walking a few steps ahead of me. And it won’t. I was afraid of that, too. I’ll have to go away and I’m worried who I am might be stolen.

And it will be. I’ll do it myself when the time comes.

I’ve taken away from myself the things that aren’t of use. I had been so right when I first got here at eighteen. I knew the world was the red-blooded workers, the believers, but there were those who wanted to destroy what we had built, discredit what we knew.

I stood under the University Court’s floodlights and told circles of people why they were wrong. Without making eye-contact, I told them exactly what I knew. I thought they were faithless thieves. I don’t know so much now.

I want to know even less.

Two years later, I went to the city because I deserved something more significant. Significance meant looking out of the windows of tall buildings. I wanted simply to be where the offices and airplanes were. I imagined the whole thing like a black and white photograph. I wanted to be seen.

My fondest memories there are of folding laundry alone in my apartment. My toenails had become brittle enough to break off by the time I left.

Learning is mostly unlearning. Finding something is the act of losing something else. I got patience from losing anxiety. I got what I know of myself from giving up on that variation of me. Any success I’ve had was a direct consequence of extraordinary failures.

I once drove home two hours in a late-night panic. Three times I thought about transferring — I did transfer twice. I thought I was in love two times and never was at all. I believed I was ruining my life. I thought it was why I wanted to write.

August of my freshman year I wrote in a green notebook, “I am a constant, boiling and seething pot of self-doubt.”

I didn’t get beyond that doubt quickly. A few days after I turned 20 I wrote, “My face is bleeding with my perversions. Odd people push through the leaves to meet me in the dirt.”

One of the three entries I wrote while in Oakland says, “I’ve got to get out of Pittsburgh. I hear it all the time to get out of Pittsburgh.”

I did get out. I trusted who had done the telling. A still small voice. The times I have spent in doubt and dismissal have only ever resulted in my increased certainty in the existence of a love and grace in the universe that I don’t deserve.

In the spring of last year I wrote, “Everyday is a breakthrough: everyday I’m growing. I’m learning. I’m happy.”

Pitt-Greensburg was mud and brick and gray and silence. Like the other things I have loved, I first fought it. I mired myself in what I thought I knew.

Stagnation broke and reality started breathing. And though the circumstances that caused those breakthroughs are passing, I believe others are coming. I know spring moves into summer and then I will be quietly pushed into fall. I will move, but I also plan to be still. I plan to be patient and listen.

For Richard Blevins, Lori Jakiela, and my father, for understanding what you understand, for having the strength to understand it, I can’t thank you enough.