#anniedet

HELLO ANNIE

hello Emily!

THAT IS SO COOL!!! You will love it in Abbottsford. They’ve got a great staff and their rooms are fabulous. Plus it’s small so you really get to know your community. My best friend Bridget (the one I’m heading to Europe with!) lived there freshman year and loved it!

You should definitely hunt for a futon, you’ll have more than enough room for it. Abbottsford rooms are big. You’ll have a mini kitchen, a bathroom, and two rooms. Most people set it up as a living room and a bedroom but it’s completely up to you. Each room will come with three desks, three beds, a couple of wardrobes, and a bunch of book cases. and that’s basically it. All the furniture is stackable, which is actually pretty awesome. You can really set it up however you want and there’s no reason to buy a loft or anything. 

I’m sorry I missed your first message. It was me, not you! stupid tumblr.

no, you won’t!! 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANNIE!

so tumblr is being all sorts of sassy today so I had to make this ask into a text post.  Annie you asked this question in like early december. early december. holy crap I suck.  I've actually written this post about three times now and then decided that I hated it and restarted. maybe 4th time's the charm?

The thing that is causing me problems is that I can't seem to find the distinction between what marquette has taught me and what life, growing older, and experience have taught me. College happens during a time in your life that things are seriously changing and this ends up changing you. So I'm sorry if the line blurs quite a bit during this post. side note: I'm writing this in the AMU and there are these two partners meeting for a project in the chairs next to me and one of the girls is being a total bitch. 

so what has MU taught me about my life and myself? community is everything.

story time! 

fair warning: this story does not begin happy.

So there's a girl in this story that I'm extremely close with. She's from back home in Minnesota and I've known her my whole life. To protect her privacy, we're gonna call her J. 

On March 30th, 2011 of the spring semester of my freshman year, at exactly 5 pm, I was taking the elevator back up to my dorm room in Cobeen with my friend Ayah. As we stepped off the elevator J texted me: "I love you." That's it. That's all she said. Knowing J as well as I do. I knew that this was not what I wanted to hear. That the period at the end of I love you meant that something was wrong. So I called her and spent the next 11 minutes trying to convince her not to kill herself. 

don't worry. She doesn't kill herself and she is now doing much better. She still struggles with depression but the downs don't last as long anymore, they're not as deep, and the ups are much more frequent. If she had killed herself I honestly probably wouldn't be at Marquette. I have no idea where I'd be.

In the weeks after my phone call with J, I started to shut down. I slept all the time, cocooned in my lofted bed. When I wasn't sleeping, in class, or faking it, I was crying. When you're suffering, and I mean really suffering, you get to a point where you think it should no longer be possible for you to cry, but somehow you find a way to. 

As I continued to cocoon myself away, my friends started dragging me out. My best friend Bridget would have someone check her into cobeen and let herself into my room. She'd text and invite me out. 

My friend Josh would let me cry. No judgement. He would just let me cry. He would ask questions, actually wanting to know the answer. He would let me talk and really listen.

The rest of my MU friends baked me cookies and would sneak them into my room when I was sleeping. When I'd wake up I'd find a fresh plate of baked goods sitting on my desk. 

My friend Garrett drew me pictures and wrote stories to go along with the cookies. My favorite is one about pirates. 

I messaged all my best friends from Minnesota a couple days after. I told them not to text or call because I was already spending much of my time crying and I was afraid that if I heard from them whenever they happened to see the message that I would be out and would end up crying in public. My best guy friends followed my rule and only facebook messaged me. My best girlfriends, as I knew they would, did not. My best friend Matthew, knowing like I did that the girls would be texting me, texted them to find out how I was doing, to keep tabs on me.

The point of this ridiculously long story is that my friends made their presence known. I knew they were there, even if they didn't know what to say (hell even I didn't know what to say). I had a community. two actually, one in Minnesota and one in Milwaukee. 

Humans are pack animals. We need each other, a support system to be there for us when we can't be there for ourselves. This idea was reinforced the next year when I joined the Dorothy Day Social Justice Living Learning Community. I already felt that joining Dorothy Day was one of the best decisions of my life, being the RA this year and finding another community just reaffirms how amazing it is. goddamnit I love my residents. I have multiple communities, overlapping communities: my info desk staff, colleges against cancer, Straz, Carpenter, my poli sci friends, my family (of course), and, a surprisingly intimate and warm community, Marquette. (like all of Marquette. teachers, students, janitors, hall directors, student managers, all of them. We're a Marquette family.

What I'm trying to say is this: I've learned to throw myself into communities. some I've built myself, some I've come across already created and inviting. They're so worth it. This life sucks and is really difficult sometimes. There would be absolutely no point if you didn't have people by your side.

GOOD LORD this is a long post. If you made it to the end you're all sorts of impressive. and I'm all sorts of flattered.