Exactly 25 years ago, I took this selfie in my Brandeis dorm room. In the first days of November 1995 we were awaiting the closing on our new Boston condo, and until then I lived on campus and commuted to my job at Structure. The better I did there, the more hours they gave me, until I was working 35 hours a week while attending school full time. If I had class in the morning, then a closing shift at the store, I would get back to Brandeis on the 10 PM commuter train from North Station, arriving at my room around 10:40 or so. This picture was taken right about then, as I summoned the energy reserve of Youth and fought with the precarious emotional state of the same.
Occupying a single corner room in the upper turret of Usen Castle, I was largely left alone. With only a few more semesters of college to go, my heart had already flown from Brandeis to Boston, and supremely uninterested in the student body around me, my focus was on my work, and on the excitement I found in Boston rather than on campus at Cholmondeley’s, the campus coffee shop a few floors below my room. On Saturday nights, when I’d be holed up finishing homework after working all day, I’d listen to the other people in my class laughing and screaming with the delight of college-age enthusiasm, and want no part of it. At the time I felt slightly ashamed of it – I knew it was odd to prefer solitude, and I knew others would think me strange for it, yet I knew that I genuinely preferred to be by myself. I didn’t begrudge them their fun, nor was any part of me envious of the fun they were having. I was facing my differences, my social anxiety, and I was all right with it.
Madonna sang ‘You’ll See’ back when they played her on the radio, and I took it on as my saddest anthem. If I hadn’t been directly wronged by a lover it was only because I didn’t have a lover. Which was sadder? Being hurt from once being loved or not being hurt because you were never loved? My heart was intent on ravaging itself to find out. On the cusp of moving into Boston, I wanted to feel something. I wanted to feel everything. Even if it was heartbreak. Even if it was the heart breaking from happiness.
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