I find myself sitting at the computer on a Tuesday night thinking of what I was doing a year ago. I feel like I should be having some deep thoughts about TASP or sobbing or both. I always expected for this to be a weepy anniversary but I have had dry eyes all day. This may sound weird and obsessive and I may be the only one but a year later not a day goes by that I don't think about TASP or the people related to it. Not one day. I don't think there is anything else I think about everyday other than my immediate needs for survival.
Maybe that's what happened to me a year ago, I found something so impressive that it became fundamentally incorporated into my identity. Sometimes I think that perhaps I romanticize the whole experience into this epic experiment in communal living, intellectual inquiry, etc. And I think that I do but there is some truth behind the memories I hold. I don't know about anyone else but before TASP I believed that there had to be other people out there like me. Like me in the sense that with these "people" I wouldn't be accused of being arrogant for the way I spoke up in discussion, or that I would find others who pursued knowledge of a given subject with the same intensity that I did or that there were people out there that were simply dreamers like me. (Damn this is coming out like an angsty teenage confession. Sorry, it will get better--I hope.) I blindly trusted that those people were out there somewhere and that surely I would meet them in the utopic world that was college. But it wasn't until the summer of '07 that I actually knew they existed. And I lived with you all and just reveled in the feverishness that such a experience produced. That first week was simply dripping with life. I was wired on the energy of excitement. And I think that sort of exuberant excitement that lasts a whole week and trickels into another five only happens once in a life time. Other experiences are either too short to reach that intensity or too long to the point where the flaws are exposed.
I look back with nostalgia now but I am also focused on what lies ahead. After TASP, I have seen the energy and brilliance of my peers. Instead of becoming disillusioned when I am confronted with all the ways the world is falling apart these days I'm thinking that we'll manage. We'll survive because the world has people like all of you. I wish we could have stayed forever but we are all needed somewhere, somehow.
I'm sorry if this is corny. I can't help it. There is too much love for this to not be corny. Either that or I am just not badass enough. My writing skills could clearly use help from you rad bloggers.
I love you all.
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TASP didn't affect me intellectually so much as it did socially. And it wasn't for any of the reasons that it was supposed to.
This will really sound like bad livejournal material, but TASP showed me that genuine kindness not only exists, but it something I can actually expect from other people. I guess you have to understand a bit about the rust belt mentality to appreciate why this was a revealation to me. Everyone around me is bitter in the way that only people trapped in an environment of unsurmountable economic rot can be. Everything around me is decaying and crumbling apart, with the exception of the nuclear waste dumped here from the Manhattan Project, and the chemical wastes of Love Canal. Everyone around me who doesn't throw up a wall of cynicism as a defense is an addict, or a fundimentalist, or just defeated, somehow. Maybe it's the lack of sunlight for so much of the time. Maybe we're all just fundimentally broken somehow. Either way, TASP really was my first experience of an environment that is loving as opposed to hostile.
That was the most important thing about the program to me. When I'd get dragged into Room 19 and told why I couldn't be so close to so-and-so (first Laura and Emily, then Dom), I could only react with a sort of indignant shock. Because that was the whole reason I felt like I was there -- to get closer to people who are actually good, who aren't broken on the inside. People who are trustworthy.
When I came back from TASP, the friends I had left behind had finally been broken. One regularly drives around drunk. Another distances himself from everyone entirely. Two of them found something in each other that was at last nonthreatening, that was safe, and have locked each other off in a weird, non-romantic codependency -- they ran away together, but not in the way you read about in fairy tales. If I hadn't had those six weeks to escape and find that there was kindness out there, I would have become like them.
TASP saved my life.
Liv, I love you.
My community, I think, is in training to become yours. They aren't quite there, but they're trying really hard. Maybe we're a little better off because the sun shines here in Colorado.
For one, all my neighbors are addicts. Addicted to what? Anything. Drugs, alcohol, negativity. I've never gone to a party and gotten drunk or tried all those drugs, not because I didn't want to, but because I didn't want to be like the rest of my community. Poor and broken. I wanted to prove to them that I was better somehow. (This is probably the reason I'm still a virgin, too) I was so terrified that my generation, with very few exceptions, was going to fall into this ignorance and depression that's so prevalent in my community.
To add to all of this, last year was the most terrifying year I've ever had at school. Not only was I afraid that there would be a massive gun fight shoot out, but I was terrified because the people in my community didn't recognize their own blatant racism and the injustice it causes so many people. Like, hanging a Confederate flag over the school is "just a little prank" from a bunch of boys that "are just being boys, and don't know any better."
My teachers had always taught me that these things weren't allowed to happen.
What would I have done last summer? Would I have become as depressed and defeated as my community? Probably.
Thank you, all of you, for giving me hope. There are people in our generation who realize there's a world out there. Who want to learn so the world will be a better place. I love you all so much!
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