I’m writing essays again for the first time in months, and it feels spectacular. I don’t know what happened in the interim, but in the last 24 hours, I’ve written the bones of what feels like some sort of unified theory of marginalization. It’s a call to a sort of politics I haven’t heard discussed before. (That doesn’t mean much, as there’s so much I haven’t read, but it’s thrilling if only because it feels new to me.) I’m fully prepared for some sort of let down, some crumbling of the work that’s beginning to take shape. In the meantime, though, I’m pretty pleased.

And there have been so many of those false starts in the last couple of weeks. Relationships that seem to determine their trajectory, then tank or just disappear. Conversations that feel meaningful in the moment, and seem hollow on second thought. Interactions that never quite track.

In my impulsive reactions, this is all because of the town, the community, the geography, the job. It couldn’t be that I am feeling young and directionless, and that I’d feel young and directionless in San Francisco or Boston or Seattle just as much as I do here. It couldn’t be that graduate school is anything other than a panacea.

But it does look so enticing. A friend recently introduced me to the Future of Minority Studies, which is the most exciting project I’ve seen in a long time. (Cross-issue organizing–my favorite–in the academy–my other favorite. What could be better?) This weekend I also re-read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which is as inspiring to me as it has been to any other collegiate queer. Layered on top of that is the recollection of what it felt like to hear these ideas for the first time, to reconfigure so much of what had felt solid and monolithic. Now I’m determined to revisit all of my old theory favorites, and to delve into whatever other critical thought I can find. (And where better to do that intensively than in a graduate program?)

Conclusion: what’s new? I’m 24 and don’t know what to do with myself.

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