Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Post-campaign I got lots of praise and thank-yous. There was many a "good job" and "thank you for your service," (which I'll admit feels pretty appropriate), and a friend of my roommate who stayed with us after the election bought me coffee and a donut for "bringing change we can believe in to North Carolina." And that was awesome. But the one I always come back to, the thing that solidifies that whole experience as worthwhile (I never questioned that it was, but it's nice to have little moments to crystallize things) is when my friend Aria told me she didn't recognize me at first when I got back. She figured I was my own cousin or something like that, and I don't think it had anything to do with a tan or facial hair. I think (and those of you who know Aria will back me up here), she recognized some sort of transformation that occured over those three months.

Part of it was the sheer volume of work. There's something transformative, hopefully positively so, about pushing yourself to a limit, any limit, because "to a limit" usually means beyond those limits. When you wake up after it all ends, you're a person with new, farther limits.

There was also the stranger in a strange land element. I honestly felt more out of place in southern North Carolina than I did during my year in Japan, but to be fair, no one expected me to act Japanese, so it was easier to define my space and self in Japan than it was in Richmond where every new acquiantancing started with some sort of tacit "See, I'm not from here." Constantly defining myself made me examine my lines more than usual. Never before had I considered how I fit the archetypes of "northener" and "yankee." As the Richmond County perspective seeped in a little, unusual (for me) thoughts and feelings would come out of my own mind. My decision to not eat meat felt snootier. My feelings on spirituality felt removed and over-intellectual. The fact that I had been asked to do little more than read, write and think for most of my life... not that I'd never considered that, but breathing RC air for three months gave me a new take on it.

Beyond all that, and at least partly because of all that, reality just seemed to play by subtly different rules down there. Perhaps it was the overall backdrop that contributed the most to that. I'm in Berkeley now (so far, every bit as awesome as advertised), and when the sublime and/or ridiculous happens here, it feels like NoCal tossing me a little extra sunshine from its perpetual surplus. When something truly nutty happened in Richmond, it was like a walrus in the living room. It was frogs and snakes falling from the sky or Curly spontaneously combusting while Larry and Moe merely feel a draft. Everything there was in a different context, and so the meaning was different too, and the whole poetry of experience was brand new for me.


So, all of that and more for three months, plus six weeks in Durham on the front end. That'll change a guy (or gal), and that's a big reason why I did it. I wasn't in a rut exactly, and I don't think I had gotten complacent, but, like the country, I needed a change.

That said, after three months of Richmond, I can't even describe how good it felt to go home.