It is officially official:

My diploma came in the mail. I have the paper documenting the completion of my M.F.A. And while I am feeling a little bitter-sweet about it, I can honestly say that I’m proud of the work I did, of the things I accomplished, and of the essays and poems I wrote.

It’s still weird to be at the (current) end of my education journey. Last time I received my diploma, I graduated with honors from Marylhurst University with my B.A. in English Literature and Writing, and my plan was to pursue a PhD. That didn’t work out, and so I chose to pursue this M.F.A. instead. And even while I was in this M.F.A. program, I talked about getting another graduate degree, either another Masters (likely an M.A. in English) or a PhD.

But right now, I have no such plans. Right now, I’m working. I’m saving. I’m paying off debt. I’m writing, writing, writing. I’m reading as much as I can stand reading. I’m setting other goals for myself outside of education.

And it’s weird. Really weird.

When I first started college, it was 2009, I was unemployed, and newly married. I needed something to do, so I went to college. Was only a few weeks from transferring to a state university when I got cold feet and decided it was too overwhelming. I dropped out, feeling a huge crisis of direction and purpose. Then I tried being a stay-at-home wife. Then I had a miscarriage. Then I tried working, but I could not hold down a job because the trauma of my miscarriages and my debilitating depression and anxiety made focusing and being around other people too painful.

Then I had another miscarriage and I lost all sense of myself. I was a hollow shell. I lost my entire identity. A lot of that was the depression and anxiety that I didn’t realize I had, a lot of it was PTSD, and a lot of it was grief. But I didn’t know these things until years later. The one thing I knew was that writing made me feel better. I spent months writing tortured poems and melodramatic fantasy short stories, but they helped me. I got myself in therapy, I unplugged the emotional passageways of my spirit, and I let myself feel whatever it was I needed to feel.

And that was HARD. Too often, we’re told to see our emotions as dangerous, deceptive, untrustworthy. But once I got into therapy, once I started really talking about what I felt, it was like I felt less like a hollow shell and more like a faded image. I was still there, I wasn’t empty, I just needed to learn how to understand myself again.

That was when I went back to college. That was when I really started pursuing literature and writing with pretty much everything I had. I poured myself into my studies because they were the only thing that actually let me feel alive without only feeling pain. I remember my first term back, I took an Ancient World Literature course with my favorite teacher. In that class, we read Medea, a play by Euripides. This play was a challenge for me to get through because it was basically a metaphorical mirror of my own experiences.

Medea is married to a man named Jason.
Medea and Jason have two children.
Medea and Jason’s marriage falls apart.
To get revenge, Medea murders their two sons.

I had been pregnant twice. My marriage was falling apart. And my body had aborted my two pregnancies when my husband’s greatest desire was to have children. This play felt so unbelievably connected to me that it was hard not to read the play with myself in Medea’s shoes. Moreover, I got mad at several places because I felt Medea was villainized when her husband, a lying, cheating, manipulative asshole, was as much to blame as was she. But even with the anger, even with the pain I felt in reading that play, there was something else stirring underneath it all, something I didn’t know how to describe then.

It was a renewed sense of myself.
It was a growing path towards healing, and I didn’t even recognize it.

I told myself over and over again that I didn’t belong in school, that I was just a poser, that I was only getting As because my teachers felt sorry for me. I told myself if I had any integrity at all, I’d drop out and just suffer silently at home. But I kept going to school everyday, and every time I did, more and more of myself started to crystalize and clarify.

It meant a complete overhaul into my identity. Who I am now is not at all the person I was back in 2014. But I am also stronger. I’m more compassionate. I’m less angry. I know myself so much more thoroughly than I did then. And I’ve healed a lot in these last eight years or so. So to be at a place of arrival rather than a place of transference is strange. New. Scary. Exciting.

This diploma symbolizes so much more than my completion of a graduate program. Which, on its own, is fucking badass and amazing. But this diploma also symbolizes my perseverance every time I felt like I couldn’t do something, couldn’t succeed, was a failure, a poser, an imposter. This diploma symbolizes every choice I made for my own future, my own success, my own survival. Even though it meant walking away from my marriage of ten years. Even though it meant losing people I cared about.

This diploma is the manifestation of my choice to care about myself first, to put myself, my needs, my goals, my dreams, my wellbeing first.

And it feels fucking fantastic to hold it in my hands, see my name printed in ink, and know that I fucking conquered.