This is the question that reaches me on a Monday night as I sit on my couch after work, absolutely exhausted and desperately needing to do something other than stare vacantly into space and let my thoughts wander. I keep opening the Instagram app aimlessly and finding my way back to my blog, which, no, there are still no new posts since I graduated last month, despite all the things I’ve done.
In true Katie fashion, the chaos of the last month has unfolded in a breathless sprint. I graduated college and then went to my last UT Austin mass and moved my stuff back to my family’s house in Dallas on the same day. Two days later I flew to New York City and spent four days hanging out with my friends from my Mexico mission trip. Then on the last day I met up with the group I’d be traveling to Israel with and left the country at approximately 12:30 am. I spent around ten days in Israel, came home, absolutely crashed from jet lag and general sleep deprivation, hung out with some friends the next day, then spent the next three days packing and taking care of moving-to-France logistics. I delayed my move to Colorado by a day or two so that I could present for Asclepios (the analog astronaut mission I work with) at a conference in the Dallas area, and my original plan was to load the car, present, change out of my suit in the bathroom of the conference center, and drive to Colorado, but that got scrapped when my car broke down right before I had to leave. So my mom dropped me off at the conference and I came home after, drove to Lubbock, stayed the night, drove to Colorado, and immediately was launched into the friend group of my new housemates. Then I started work the next day! And it’s been a whirlwind first three weeks.
So I think I crammed just about as much as humanly possible in the past 30 days, and even writing that (and you reading it) took a solid few minutes. There’s so much there that I could talk about. New York? Israel? Colorado? That’s three whole places to try to recap! The question becomes where to begin and what to say, and does it really matter to say it at all?
I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of being quiet for a long time— maybe during a standardized test or just going to see a movie— and finding yourself unable to speak once the silence is over. My best friend and I went on a silent retreat during one college spring break and after not speaking for three days, we found ourselves casting around for some way to start a conversation. What to say when you have so much to say?
Of course it seems a little silly to say so much about not saying anything (my friends used to joke that some people have a special talent for this.) But the question is bigger. Why do I want to share stories, why am I writing a blog post that maybe five people will read, why do I keep coming back to my little Instagram blog? Why does it matter?
I write because I love reading, and I read because hearing other people’s stories— what they notice and what makes them laugh and what went dramatically wrong but turned out okay— makes life seem that much more full and exciting. There’s a catharsis in storytelling, and a romanticism as well. To deem a story worthy of writing down or speaking out loud is to say that this fragment of life matters. Think about how often we come home from the grocery store and hold up a new coffee creamer to a roommate and say, “look what I got!” How often do we call a friend to talk about someone attractive we saw at the park or a speeding ticket we got or a plant that we accidentally killed? We spend so much of our lives sharing these little moments and forget them almost instantaneously, but the sharing matters.
When there’s too much to say, I like to start small. Small like I drive forty minutes to work every day and I see the mountains in the not-too-far distance and I say to myself, “I am the luckiest girl in the world.” Small like the living room at our house in Fort Collins is half taken up by giant balloons sent by my boyfriend for my 22nd birthday. Small like at work someone told me that if you get rocket fuel on your clothes you have to wash them really carefully so they don’t catch fire in the drier. Small like I spend so many evenings hanging out at the park, watching the sunset with my friends, and the joy of those nights lingers in the same way that the summer sun seems to stick around that much longer.
What to say after a long silence? Just this—the magnitude of a story is often conveyed in the minutiae.
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