#12: Point the Flashlight
Hey everyone! The newsletter lives, am I right? I think I start every one of these with some kind of assertion of the continued survival of this thing, as I've slowly gone from a weekly to a monthly appearance in your inboxes. Once again, I'm still here, and I'm very glad for it.
Today I have a short little personal thing about starting grad school this week. That's below, but first I want to point you in the direction of something new I started doing this week over at The Alternative. It's called "On Shuffle," and it's a new weekly column that I'll be writing in which I'll flip the all-powerful shuffle switch to the "maximum shuffle" setting and let the powers of chance decide what I write about. If you like this newsletter, you're too nice, but also you'll probably dig this too (especially if you're here exclusively for the tunes, which I'm sorry there won't be a ton of on the I Keep a Diary channel this week). Check that out over here:
- Introducing: On Shuffle
- On Shuffle #1: Discovery's "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" (ft. Angel Deradoorian)
Thank you for allowing me this brief advertisement. Now on to more Diary-branded content:
Now is the time to talk about the big change—I've been meaning to sit down and write about it but I've been too busy attending to it happening to really get into it. But this is the first week of classes and I think I want to get out a few brief thoughts as everything starts to get moving.
About a month ago, I left my office job. As is typical for me, I spent months and months agonizing over this decision, years wondering if I really was all that happy with the path I was headed down and didn't feel like I had much control over. I have spent an inordinate amount of time in my life trying to decide what exactly I should be doing (or maybe the better way of saying it is trying to decide which thing I should be doing, I had plenty of ideas), a lot of time I could probably have spent actually doing something worthwhile.
I tend to let things get a little bit on top of me—usually they're small things, like oh I've gotta fold the laundry before I can do the dishes before I can take a nap-type things—and when I let things pile up I tend to feel very stuck. I am not good at making decisions. I take a very long time, or I forsake the decision-making entirely until a single option reveals itself naturally. One by one, it's not that big of a deal, but I did have a moment not so long ago when I turned around and realized I really hadn't made a lot of decisions myself about my life. I just ended up somewhere, which is a fine and normal way to be I think, but the realization did lead me to take more seriously the nagging idea in my brain that I might need to make some changes.
I am aware how this may look. Believe me, I am hyper-aware. I've thought a lot about what has motivated me to go back to school and I think it's complicated and a little hard to sum up here. But the most important thing I think for me to focus on right now is that I just want to do it. I'm excited to do it. I want to read the books and do all the writing and help teach all the fresh new college students how to write. I want to get to the point where I have to build something big and difficult. Something that, if I had kept everything the way it was, I just didn't have the time, resources, or skills to do on my own.
Back in the pre-newsletter days, I wrote on my personal blog about taking chances. It was about the very very good Told Slant album from last year, but it was also about how I've been scared to make big changes without knowing how things are going to turn out:
I think a number of these songs are speaking in the context of relationships, but I tend to look at them in terms of how they talk about getting a little brave and charging forward with a path you can never be 100 percent sure is correct. Taking steps into the dark with whatever knowledge or love or faith or whatever it is that you do have and knowing from experience that whatever distance you can see ahead of you might not be enough. You may be headed for a dead end or a cliff or whatever. But that’s alright, you have time. You can always point the flashlight back in the other direction and figure it out from there.
Things are going to go how they're going to go. Maybe this won't turn out the way I wish it would, and that'll be alright. But I think for now what I'm thinking about is how I'm feeling in this exact moment, as classes get started and I start walking into that forest. I was talking to my dad the other day and he kind of shocked me toward the end of our conversation. "You sound so happy," he said. "I'm so excited for you." It was simple, but I realized just then how long it had been since someone said something like that to me, so directly, and I didn't have to lie about it being true. Maybe that's a little sappy or naive, but I do think it's enough to believe that, after at least a year of agonizing, I am headed in the right direction for now.
When I finally decided to apply to grad school again in October, I was listening to an advance of the latest (and last) Joan of Arc album. We had just gotten home from a little isolated cabin weekend that was a lot of fun, and when I walked back into my house on a very cool, nice Fall afternoon, I don't know, I just knew I was ready to go for something new. I have not parsed out how this connects to Tim Melina Theo Bobby, but that particular album felt well-suited to what was happening in my brain at the time. Here's a great song, "Destiny Revision," to send you off with:
My name is Jordy Walsh, and I’m a writer based in Philadelphia. I write about music for The Alternative and Slant Magazine. I Keep a Diary is a newsletter about music, books, writing, and probably a lot of vague emotions. You can follow me on Twitter for more thoughts on all that stuff and also a lot of pictures of my dog. Thanks for joining me.