After several tense months of living at home in Omaha, I moved to Lincoln, about fifty miles away. I wanted my independence and my “space” and to feel like an adult even though I was so far from being an adult. I was twenty years old and I felt like I was twelve years old and I felt like I was twenty years old and I felt like I was a hundred years old. I knew nothing but thought I knew everything.
The apartment, subsidized by my parents of course, was a one-bedroom with a tiny kitchen and a balcony, where I smoked with continued enthusiasm.
I went to my parents’ house often, and I would stock up on toilet paper and groceries from my mother’s pantry. Things were still fractured between us, but I knew, as always, that I had a home. I had a very well-financed crack-up. I did not go hungry even as I hungered for so much.
To at least try to support myself, I held a series of odd jobs—adult video store clerk, telemarketer, Gallup poll taker, loan consolidator at a student loan company—and quickly realized that without a college degree I was only ever going to work odd jobs for minimum wage. I was readmitted to Yale, but the thought of returning to New Haven was unbearable. I turned twenty-one and celebrated by buying a six-pack of Corona even though I hate the taste and stink of beer. Later that night, a woman I was casually dating called, and when I mentioned it was my birthday and I was sitting alone in my apartment, with a sweaty six-pack of cheap beer, she offered to show me a good time. I don’t even remember what we did. I had no friends. I ended up finishing my degree through a brief residency program at Vermont College, which was, at the time, part of Norwich University—a military college in Vermont. I wrote and wrote and wrote.
I very much wanted to be a writer, so I enrolled in the MA program in creative writing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. I worked at night and went to school during the day. I was broke all the time, which is not to be confused with being poor. I had a safety net and I knew I had a safety net, and though there were many days I was fueled by ramen, still I did not go hungry while I hungered. I rarely slept because it was in sleep that I was forced to confront myself, my past. I was tormented by terrible dreams, memories really, of those boys, the woods, my body at their lack of mercy.
At the university, I went to classes and learned about Victorian literature and cultural theory and postcolonialism and I sat in workshops with students who were surprisingly generous in their feedback about my writing, given common wisdom about writing workshops. I served as an editorial assistant for Prairie Schooner, the program’s literary magazine, and was mostly relegated to opening all the incoming mail—hundreds of submissions a week from writers like me who just wanted to be discovered. It was there that I learned that one of the best ways to measure where you stand as a writer is to work at a literary magazine. We received all manner of submissions. People sent in diaries, odes to their cats, entire novels or books of poetry, all carefully printed out and stuffed into manila envelopes. There were many submissions from prisoners who were just as lonely as I was, who had found their voices in their prison cells and wanted their voices to be heard. I pored over the cover letters from all these writers who would share seemingly anything about their lives.
When I got home at night, I generally went straight to my computer, where I wrote story after story, mostly about women and their hurt because it was the only way I could think of to bleed out all the hurt I was feeling. I frequented newsgroups and chat rooms for survivors of sexual assault. Though I couldn’t tell anyone in my real life what had happened, I unburdened myself to strangers on the Internet. I blogged, mostly about the minutiae of my life, hoping, I think, to be seen and heard. I loved and craved the freedom of being online and being free from my life and my body. I ate and ate and ate but rarely was any of the food I ate memorable for any reason but the quantity. I ate mindlessly, just to fill the gaping wound of me or to try to fill the gaping wound of me. No matter how much I ate, I still hurt and I was still terrified of other people and the memories I couldn’t escape. I managed to put together a collection of short stories for my thesis, entitled How Small the World, and successfully defended my thesis and then I was done with school and I had no idea what to do so I got a job working at the university as a writer for the College of Engineering. I tried to do what was expected of me. Some days, I tried really hard.
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As I spent more time working at the College of Engineering, I realized that when I had dreamed of making a living as a writer, I probably should have been more specific about what, exactly, I meant by that. And still, every day I got to write. I had my own office and a computer on which I could play solitaire and work on my own writing. I mostly wrote articles about faculty research—things that I knew nothing about and that the faculty were more than eager to explain to me—on robotic construction equipment, aerogels that could be used in space, defenses against bioterrorism, innovative uses for RFID chips.
The job was fine, by far the best job I had ever had, making the most money I had ever made even though I was not making much money at all. I had a great, encouraging supervisor named Constance, who made me a much better writer. I learned how to use the Adobe Creative Suite. I worked with undergraduate engineering students as the adviser of their magazine.
And still, I would sit in professors’ offices listening to them talk about their research and think, I could totally do what they do. Certainly, that was a bit grandiose, but I was working ten-hour days, always at someone else’s whim. I envied the freedom faculty seemed to have, teaching two or three times a week, setting their own schedules and being handsomely compensated.