issue seventy-one
desert dispatches from the world’s first ever graduate
4/24/25
I’ve started crying again. After about a three year lapse, with two major fissures in that particular surface, I find myself blown wide open by the sentimentality of this season. I’m sorry, I hate saying “this season” because it reminds me of churchspeak, but that’s just sort of where I find myself these days.
I’m crying again and feeling lots softer than I have been, leading up to the eve of my college graduation. It might not be my last, but for now it’s my first and a day that long felt abstract and fuzzy until it smacked me in the face with its immediacy. I’m writing parts of this from my senior house, bunked up with my roommates; there are 6 of us here, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. My dress, shoes, cap (never met such an adversary to my hair) and gown (weirdly short on me, but what can we do) are all laid out next to me, and I probably have an aloe sheet mask on or something.
It’s somewhat ironic that I feel undeniably softer at the conclusion of this chapter, after meeting the person I’ve grown into. As I carved my own place in college and molded my identity through my journey into independence, I sort of did it with the forceful grace with which one would throw wet clay onto a rapidly spinning wheel. I faced what it was like to fail, and mustered up the courage to start over. I learned to excel - and win - and really liked the feeling I felt when I did. I learned my place and learned my context, and began to accept the portions of the latter I would never be able to change.
In the process of all of this, I found myself fashioning a piecemeal, hyper-competent war machine. I felt dull, detached, impossibly far from vulnerability - burnt out, certainly. There’s a reason why this newsletter has been dormant for 2 years; I look back on a time when I had the energy to fire off 2,000 cogent words each Sunday and I just have to open-mouth guffaw. I think this came from throwing myself headfirst into a new identity - writer - and a new dream in lieu of the old ones I had lost in dance. Man, was I mouthy and punching above my weight, just swinging my hardest at the massive clouds of concepts raining down on me. Everything was bigger than I was, and I had never felt smaller while, of course, projecting the exact opposite. There’s a reason why reading your old writing sucks, and I’m living proof of it.
The last time I was preparing to graduate, I was fighting lethargy in pursuit of kinetic creation, kindling a waning flame, and desperately pushing my body to an untenable place it couldn’t follow. Now I’m more self-indulgent. Gentle with myself in the times that I need it, and trying to get better at not being unreasonably harsh and hardened with her in all others.
I look at photos of my freshman-year self (some of which you all have definitely seen) and want to cradle her face in my two hands. She looked like an actual zygote, and had no idea what was to come or who she would become in just four years. For this reason, I really liked that TikTok trend from this spring about meeting your past self for coffee. It’s hard not to get weepy thinking about having a conversation with past Leah; she was so quiet, and so scared, and so bright and beautiful. I carry her with me, a shielded Russian doll, somewhere safe and quiet where this world can’t get to her.
I also understand a bit deeper now what it means to create in service of something. So much of my aimlessness as I grew into becoming my own person meant having all these ideas and this drive and not knowing where to put it. In the incubator of college, I learned exactly where to put it, how to shape it, and where it was wanted and warranted. I didn’t put in a 7 hour night shift every Tuesday for the sake of reporting my own articles - I did it in service of one of the most awe-inspiring places I’ve had the privilege of calling home: a student newspaper. I didn’t dive headfirst into working with my peers to lead and create transformative orientation experiences for the sake of the cool t-shirts and golf carts - although those were definitely perks. I did it in service of the community I saw so desperately needed to be changed, and for the sake of the first-years like me walking wide-eyed into a whole new universe. I didn’t work to build a space for my community in an increasingly hostile PWI environment for no reason at all. I did so because I am a firm believer in the work my peers and I did to protect it, and knew how isolating my campus felt in its absence.
I’ve done a lot of work I’m really proud of. I have some plaques and papers and awards and a bound 50-page thesis written with my best friend to show for it, and also several persisting headaches and (new development) eye dryness. I have lifelong grudges and lifelong family forged over inside jokes and dining hall plates. I dove into the fullness of Indianapolis and absolutely fell in love with it, which makes leaving it even harder. I found my corners of campus and the city, and made them my own slowly but surely; I’d like to think I left an impact in at least a few of those.
At the same time, I’ve missed out on a lot of things. I’ve spent more nights staring into my Macbook than out into the world, and still have some regrets about not making myself more available to the people around me. It’s one thing to come to college an introvert terrified of raising your hand and leave realizing how necessary being with people around you is, and it’s entirely something else leaving a burnt-out workaholic who robbed yourself of your own memories while you had the time to make them. In any case, I’m grateful for the time, and grateful for it all - I know now exactly how special it was. How wrecked I am to have had it at all!
5/24/25
The Southwest is - somehow - drier than I ever could have imagined. Every morning when I get up to drive to work, the grocery store, wherever, I have to blink away my shock at seeing the mountains that separate the distant horizon looming over the road and splitting it from the ever-expansive sky. Indiana didn’t even have hills. I can count the days I’ve seen clouds on both hands, and the wind caresses my cheeks and my shoulders every time I step outside my door. Without a lick of humidity in the mountain air, I think to myself that this is a long way from the North Carolina summers I grew up on.
I’m writing this from my bedroom in Santa Fe, where I’ll be until August. I’m working a job I really love, and excited by the open-ended summer ahead of me. I have free will and free time - a dangerous combination that has mostly resulted in this return to personal essays and rewatching my favorite TV shows. So, obviously going swimmingly so far. I have my same products and clothes and routines - sans most of my sentimental affects which have been shipped home - and I’m getting used to introducing myself to others, while reminding myself who I am in the process.
In the stillness I’m sort of confused on what to do with myself. I take tentative steps toward the things I love that the rigor of my college experience robbed me of: reading in the sunlight for hours, journaling through my thoughts until I can sit with them, taking long walks that ground me in my legs and my spine. At the same time, I’m paralyzed by the stillness. I’m obviously neither the first nor the last to feel this way post-grad, but it’s an uncomfortable quiet I’m working to adjust to.
To fill that quiet, I’m listening to music I listened to in high school, and then again in middle school. It anchors me, and once I feel my feet beneath me on the ground it simultaneously drags me back to a different place or time: the grassy knoll on Fulton Street Beach overlooking Lake Michigan; a sticky green room in some theater, between lipstick swipes reflected in my purple glittery Caboodle; a church basement in Hermitage, Tennessee; the dusty marley floors of a dance studio in the Loop; driving through the suburbs of Indianapolis with an aching stomach and a bottomless well of hope below it.
It feels tender and electric to be someplace so new - a feeling I probably haven’t felt since my summer in DC two years ago. The world feels bigger than ever, and I still feel small. I mostly feel like I’m cosplaying some caricature of the idealized post-grad 20-something, packing up my car and driving across the country to a new dream. At the same time, everyone I love is over 1,000 miles away, which doesn’t help the unmooring I feel while floating through all the free time at my fingertips. It can be lonely paving my path this far off-course, but at least I feel a bit of comfort in my own independence; I’ve done this on my own before, and I can do it again knowing how rich my life is in care and love from those around me. I feel it propel me into the desert - like a Western wind - and it carries my body up to the Santa Fe stars. For the first time in a long time, I can actually see them if I look up, every single night.
Thank you for reading this. If you did, you may have no clue who I am or why I popped up in your inbox after 2 years of silence - great questions, thank you for asking them! If this is where we part ways, I get it. If you decide to stick around, I’m grateful for you! As embarrassing as it is to crawl back here, tail between legs, seemingly in a dying age following the initial Substack boom that brought me to a very different platform in 2021 - I’m glad to be back.
If you couldn’t tell, I’m looking forward to easing back into writing now that I have the time and brainspace to do so. Trust that I have a laundry list of reviews brewing in my brain, and a number of half baked ideas sitting in my Notes app. There were countless moments over the last 2 years that I thought to myself, just jump back in, put pen to paper. Obviously, I didn’t have the capacity to do so, but it feels good to write to you again, and I hope you’ll stick around to listen when I do moving forward. As always, I’m taking suggestions, or pen pals, or just your thoughts on whatever I’m sending into the void. You can reach me at literateleah@gmail.com and I’d love to hear from you - seriously, reach out. Sending love from Santa Fe - Leah :)
reading this through tearful eyes
omg, hello again!!! LOVED THIS (especially since I graduate Friday- how strange and exciting and normal??)