21.

Wish I could talk to her.

Lately, people have been posting photos of themselves when they were twenty-one years old. Here we go. I was in my third and last year at North Carolina State University; thanks to Advanced Placement classes and testing, and to NCSU testing in English and French, I entered as a sophomore. I got my BA in psychology in three years, and my M.Ed in counseling from Boston University one year later, the baby in my cohort.

So that’s one thing I would tell her: slow down. I could have taken a year off to write in-between. Boston University had been slavering to have me since tenth grade, they would have waited for me if I wanted to defer. I’ll bet they would have even rented my beloved brownstone apartment to me if I had secured my spot in the cohort of 1994 instead of 1993. Imagine writing in that cozy one-and-a-half room studio with a three window view of the Charles River for a year. Snow and BU, MIT and Harvard crews rowing past my windows as I put the worlds in my head on paper and sent them out into the world, and spent time learning who I was.

This picture is actually my twenty-first birthday, 2.16.1993, in my first apartment. It fell on the scheduled day for my fraternity’s weekly business meeting, so I invited everyone to have the meeting at my place. They surprised with goofy decorations and a cake. That’s Chi Alpha Omega’s finest right there, Yinka, Ned, and Chris. Note in the background: the vinyl, the CD shelf, and the cassette shelf on the wall. February, 1993 was a transitional time for media.

This is that year, in that apartment. Behind me you can zoom in and see my familiar, Belsnickle the magical bunny, on the shelf. My actual pet bunny, Lopsided, is not pictured. That’s the Mac LC that I wrote my first published story on. See, I should have taken a sabbatical to celebrate my speedy cum laude completion and kept writing to build my foundation.

I was shooting that disc gun at pyramids of those Dixie cups.

I wish I could tell her she was beautiful, and she was most certainly not fat, that she needed help to finish conquering her eating disorder and managing her first kitchen. That that guy, whose clutter is everywhere, even on her writing and studying chair, is passive-aggressive and needs to get his stuff, get on his motorcycle, and go home to his mother. Remember that argument he had with you about names not shaping character? He was wrong, and your idea became your first publication. He wasn’t pleased. He wasn’t going to be pleased, 21.

That sombrero that Chris is wearing is from my twenty-first birthday dinner at a Mexican restaurant. I got really self-conscious, so Dad wore it for me.

I would tell her she really was loved, and she still is friends with members of her fraternity, including these guys. Distance is only life, not a measure of love. That she has rejection sensitive dysphoria because she has autism, and those feelings that the whole world is going on and out without her aren’t real, they are part of how her brain is wired. You’re just wired differently, not wrong, 21. I would tell her to get evaluated for autism then/now, because there are so many services for a college kid newly diagnosed with autism that there aren’t for a fifty-one-year-old woman. I’d tell her what a relief diagnosis will be, how all the confusions throughout her life, that feeling that everyone else has a social guidebook that she does not, will come into sharp focus and into explanation with a satisfying click. The ensuing feeling of relief will be incomparable. She will enjoy graduate school even more…and she will not agree to meet that man she should not have married. She won’t give up Boston for him.

I would tell her about the physical disabilities to come, tell her to continue walking campus and around the lake at her apartment as much as possible, for her body needs it and she will miss it. I would tell her to reexamine those childhood pictures carefully, the ones with twisted and bent ankles, twisted arms, sitting in a w position…and show them to a doctor. EDS might have been diagnosed decades earlier, and who knows. I would tell her to tell that doctor about those times she fainted as a child, and how heat intolerant she was. POTS, as well. I would tell her to drink water and electrolytes and carry fluids everywhere and don’t ever let anyone tell her heat is no big deal…

I would tell her she’s beautiful.

I would tell her she’s beautiful.

I would tell her she’s beautiful.

It reminds me to take care of young Carla. She needs further autism support and the right medications and sometimes she just needs to play and create and not be responsible for a while. I’m still learning to listen to what I need without judgment, without interjecting what I “should” be doing instead. A lifetime of a river of ruminating is hard to dam. But the more I learn about the difference in how I see and approach things (everything is connected, I have always told you this) and the firehose of information in my head, and my social awkwardness, I become more and more aware of what I am and was going through. And the noise and frustration becomes calming information. And the rushing dangerous river is becoming a nice swimming hole, welcoming for others. (10.4.2023)