metamorphosis?

As has been the case throughout this blog's duration, all the most important or interesting things to happen to me happen all at once and I skip out on writing about them. In the past, these have generally been excursions (my memory is somewhat poor, but I seem to recall Balaton last fall and DC this summer being major omissions); this time, I've left the vicinity of campus not more than once. In other words, whereas 'changes' or 'adventure' even only really applied to my life in an external sense, something that I do, this last month has been really momentous internally. And by that I don't mean like I now have some disease of the kidney or anything--I feel like I'd been doing a lot of growing up in outlook and ideas in the last year, but this last month has been the time when my actions, my life, has caught up in a kind of growth spurt of its own. I kept wanting to write little individual bits as they happened, but it always felt (still feels) like there's too much to try and cover at once. I'll try to get through the major parts piece by piece, follow up on whatever I dropped, and generally reinvest myself in this sort of big internet experiment, which I like to think of as a way to stay connected in some way to friends you don't get a chance to really talk with as often as you might like.

To begin: finished the AAMP training in the last week of august exhausted but fulfilled in way that has been lacking in my life before. There's a huge gap between knowing something to be true and doing something about it, especially when you're in "the academy" and there was something about the way things went during training that made me want to make the jump across it. The part that got to me the most was talking about how directly immigration impacted the lives of everyone at training; it made me really think about how lucky my family is. My grandfather was reunited with his family (who had been in China) only in 1947, and now my grandparents are looking at ten grandchildren, all of whom will have gone to college (assuming my sister follows through on applying this year *cough*), six of whom are currently happily married with kids of their own, etc etc. Comparing that sort of classic immigration story with the stories of those around me made me realize just how privileged and lucky I am. And as a result, I want to do my part to help others succeed in this country. I'm interviewing monday morning for an internship at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, doing community outreach/awareness work, possibly with immigrant or particularly API communities.

After a year and a half of waffling (I think since I declared), I'm committed to writing a history thesis; it's going to be about how API immigrants used the American legal system 1880-1940 or so, both as a means of fighting for universal rights and as a direct challenge to legislation aimed at excluding them from mainstream society. I think there's a great opportunity to use ideas from politics or Chicano studies about assimilation and what it means to be an American in a context that has personal meaning. At the same time, I will have a chance to look into how access to and denial of the American legal system plays into educational or economic outcomes, the same structural problem addressed by Legal Aid. It's amazing how galvanizing that August has been.

I'm also planning to apply for fellowships, and those are scary. Law school is now an almost-certain destination, but that won't happen for another couple years.

I've engaged in some radical realignment of my social circle since school started. After the last couple years of anxiety and doubt about how I was getting along with people, I feel like I can accept that not everyone is going to be a friend, and that that doesn't say anything about whether they're good people or not. I feel like I've been compulsive probably since middle school in seeking approval (in the form of friendship) from people I think of as good. As it has turned out, those friendships can end up being one-way--people may tolerate or even enjoy your company, but your absence is not meaningful to them. It is the act of missing someone that distinguishes how much you care, and it is acting on it that affirms your end of the friendship. Rather than being anxious and calling and trying to stay "in the loop" and basically stressing out over the meaning of not being affirmed (i.e. not being missed), I've realized I can let it go. You don't have to blow up at people about it, though I did a couple weeks ago--recognizing the limitations of a relationship doesn't mean you have to sever ties with people--but it's so important to make your own peace with it. I'm trying to replace acquaintanceship with spending meaningful time with people who affirm me, and I'm consciously working to affirm them in the same way. I sleep easier this way.

In the same vein, I think I'm finally recognizing what killed my past couple serious relationships, or at least its primary symptom: a lack of compromise. I know a lot of it has to do with being young and stubborn, but mutually acceptable conflict resolution has been absent, utterly absent. Somehow, I've failed completely to recognize the disconnect between loving someone and being conciliatory in disagreements; in fact, I feel like closeness brought out the worst of my competitiveness and exacerbated arguments. Here's where the gulf between knowing something intellectually and living by that knowledge is a bitch. I know I'm not going to get better about this overnight, in the same way that I know tomorrow will not be the first day I'm able to concentrate completely on my obligations. But knowing is a start.