Rolling Thunder Chasing the Wind
2019 was a year of fear.
It’s strange to see those words typed out. I always have tried to approach each passing year with a sense of ambition, confidence, and maybe even narcissism. I think we all do….
“This will be MY year.”
I struggle to believe I’m the only one who mutters that phrase year after year. There is a feeling of comfort in always believing that the best is yet to come. It seems counter-intuitive, but there, at least in the case of January 1st, is comfort in the unknown.
The comfort envelopes you at all sides, assuring you that there is more to come. That there is better to come.
I always subscribed to this belief…wrapped myself in this comfort during the no mans land between Christmas Day and January 1st every year.
Until the end of 2018. Looking towards 2019 on the calendar only brought me dread.
2018 was a year of redemption for me. It was my Chance the Rapper “And We Back” soliloquy, but, in the same breath, it was my debut. And by debut, I don’t mean my reveal to all of you…I don’t mean some dazzling image of myself projected on a screen for the world around me to see.
It was not only a debut of myself…It was a debut to myself.
By the end of 2018, I looked in the mirror and felt like I knew exactly who I was. In the past, I had seen two eyes, two eyebrows, a nose, a mouth…oh and some acne. In December of 2018, I saw experiences in the reflection. I saw Luke.
In July, I had flown across the country to Seattle to spend a week with some of the smartest and goofiest people I had ever met. I came straight back to start my senior year of high school, which was just like High School Musical if you are wondering, in Amory…..the location is important.
I worked my ass off to get my ACT score to where it needed to be. I wrote college admission essays for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I was on a redemption tour….to prove that I could get to where I wanted no matter what high school I graduated from or dropped out of. I told myself repeatedly that I would show the world I could do it. Only after the Yale acceptance video flashed did I realize that I never set out to prove anything to the world. More than anything, I was pushing like hell to show myself it was possible.
But all of that personal achievement in 2018 is meaningless compared to the people I got to experience it with. I started running and signed up for a half-marathon thanks to my friend Sunny, and I got to run it alongside Shelby Sledge…who is undoubtedly one of my best friends because of the experience. I had the opportunity to build and ride on a winning Homecoming float with my best friends and senior class. I spent many nights on the Helton’s couch, dead-tired after rambunctious nights with the friends who meant the most to me. Maybe my biggest accomplishment was surviving the first semester of calculus. It was a class I hated and struggled in. The struggles always bring out the greatest treasures, and in the shadows of calculus rose Mrs. Sawyer and Jamison McComb, a teacher I learned to treasure for life and a friend turned best friend through conversations split by screenshots of practice calculus problems. In my Yale acceptance reaction video, the part I care the least about is the acceptance letter itself. Rather, it is the embrace I shared with Davis, my best friend and closest confidant, and Mrs. Jennifer Hood, the teacher who taught me there can be a ton of fun in putting my nose to the grindstone day in and day out.
These were only a handful of the extraordinary people and moments I experienced in the year of 2018. With high school coming to a close in 2019, I felt some sort of a sense of dread…it felt like the end was nearing.
As 2019 began to progress, I accepted that maybe I couldn’t top my 2018. And maybe I didn’t have to. 2018 was the epic chapter in the narratives of our teenage lives, and now it was time to close the monumental story off…it was time for a bookend.
And when May struck, I saw the book slam shut. I celebrated the occasion by sobbing in my bedroom.
However, as I would find out two months later on a plane to Yale, a terrifying university in a part of the United States I had never set foot in, a new story was due for an introduction.
And in the mountains of New Hampshire, the sidelines of football games, behind the camera at protests and parties, on the front page of the Yale Daily News and behind the scenes at the desk, and from the comfort of the Lawrance B21 common room, I penned that introduction.
It has been an introduction by fire — lived, written, and remembered at blistering pace. Nevertheless, a new narrative has been born. Where will it go? I cannot possibly know. There is comfort in the unknown.
As we enter the new Roaring 20s, I am stationed back home in Amory for holiday break…taking refuge from the high speed chase of the new narrative I am embarking upon. I sit now in front of the book of my adolescence, and I am scanning it page by page, revisiting and reliving the best times with the best people. We are all moving on and chasing our own stories, but we hold this age-old story together…the timelessness of growing up.
2020 looms at the stage. And behind the curtains I stand, pen in hand, ready to write the epic chapters of the new narrative of my life.