Enduring Two Years of Botched Surgery
My Columbia MFA Experience
“You can’t really know what it is to want things until you’re at least 30. And then with each passing year, it gets bigger … because the want is more, and the possibility is less. Like how each passing year of your life seems faster because it’s a smaller portion of your total life. Like that. But in reverse. Everything becomes pure want.” —Greta Gerwig, ‘Mistress America’
When we are young, we are told that nothing greater exists than the measure of our possibility. Impatient, we spend the beginning of our lives wanting to be older, desperate to be legal, to escape our home and all the remnants of our childhood as if we’re convicts on the lam. When we finally arrive at adulthood, we pause, look around, and wonder if all this — the bills, cramped apartments, roommates and their strange nocturnal habits, our desire to staple passive-aggressive all-caps emails to our employers’ heads, the crippling realization that we might possibly drown in our student loan and credit card debt, and let’s not forget the Odyssean commute and the strangers who enrage us even before…
