Thoughts and Prayers

 It’s a Wednesday night, entering into Thursday morning and I’m sitting here with a pit in my stomach filled with stone. Another school shooting. Another group of students and teachers shot and killed. More students and teachers and parents traumatized by a gunman walking into an Elementary School and opening fire. The stories are always slightly different, but they are EXACTLY THE SAME. 

It was a 1999 when school shootings entered my world, when we all watched the horrors of Colombine unfold. I was 12. Even then I didn’t really understand it and the effects weren’t really there yet, not for me at least. I remember that year my aunt gave everyone clear backpacks for Christmas because her kids’ school had mandated them in an effort to make school “safer”. It sat in my closet for a few years until it was finally donated in one purge or another. Even as a kid, I thought, “How the hell are clear backpacks supposed to help?” This was the same year Never Been Kissed came out and we saw Drew Barrymore walk through metal detectors and have her metal nail file confiscated, “This is a weapon…” That was a weapon…

I was in high school and we started doing drills. At my high school if you heard “Polar Bear Swim-a-thon” you were to go into lockdown procedures. I don’t remember anyone taking it too seriously. A. the name of our lockdown procedure was inadvertently funny. B. this kind of thing wouldn’t happen in my town…right? I’d known all of my classmates for years. We grew up in the same small sheltered town in Massachusetts. This couldn’t possibly happen here. Senior year, there were a few bomb threats, but it was chalked up to someone wanting to get out of class. 

It’s a Monday in April, 2007. I’m in classes at Suffolk University, enjoying a newfound freedom in both my personal and educational existence. Then we hear about a shooting at Virginia Tech. I heard the story of Liviu Librescu, a professor and Holocaust survivor, who propped the door to his lecture closed so his student’s could escape to safety. I was heartbroken for everyone involved, for this man who lost his life saving his students, for the fear that these things brought. But, I went to Suffolk. We didn’t even really have a campus and it just didn’t seem like a necessary worry. 

It’s a Friday in December 2012. I had just finished teaching my class and went to check my mailbox in the front office. My friend who was the school’s secretary had a look on her face. There were a bunch of people huddled in the front office. That’s how I learned about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Sitting in a school 80 miles away, thinking about how close it felt and how different it felt this time. I wasn’t a student fearing for my life, I was a teacher. These kids were my kids. I read about the victims but this time I saw myself in Victoria Soto, who died protecting her students. She was only 27 years old, two years my senior. I went home that Christmas and had a conversation with my family that if anything like that happened at my school, there was a good chance I wouldn’t make it home. That if forced to make that choice, I would protect my students with my life. This is a conversation and a choice educators should not have to make. 

It was around 2015-6 when we had a lockdown drill in the school that I vividly remembered because I found a student in the hall a full day afterwards shaking and crying. When I asked what was wrong, they couldn’t tell me. They couldn’t say. They’re older sister was walking by so I let her take him to a quiet area to calm him down and we’d get him back to class. She later told me that after the lockdown drill he was so terrified that this could happen here. He was so scared that this was real. Who has the heart to try to explain to a shaking, traumatized, terrified 12 year old that this is, absolutely, a reality. Around the same time, students were speaking about lockdowns and I told them to take it very seriously, to always look for escape routes, and to never look back. I told my students that they are, under no circumstances, to check on me but to run like hell. I told my students point blank that I would hold the door no matter what. One student looked confused and asked what I meant. One his classmates said outright, “She is going to be our shield…even if it means standing between us and a gun.” She was right…but God almighty is that a horrible thing for a student to understand. 

It’s the 2018-2019 school year, and I’m teaching in Morocco. A student jokes about guns, keeps picking things up and pretending to shoot people. When it happens, my whole body tenses up. I sit everyone down and explain that this is not something that we should be joking about. This is not something “fun” but something that is really, REALLY, scary where I come from. Students literally cannot understand or contemplate how this could possibly be the reality that I grew up in or that I taught in before. 

It’s 2022 and it’s happened again. I’m on the phone and someone asks me reluctantly  if I’ve heard. My response, “Oh…the school shooting…” Even I am horrified at my reaction, but I literally have to shut down when these things happen until I am back in the privacy of my own home and have the time and energy to sit and cry and process. 

It. Just. Keeps. Happening. Again. And. Again. 

And every time it happens, “Thoughts and Prayers” roll in….but absolutely NOTHING CHANGES. Nothing. If people mention gun control it’s “stop politicizing the deaths of children”. If people say anything other than “THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS” they are somehow disrespectful? People come out of the woodwork to say, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” “It’s not the guns, it’s mental health in this country!” or “Even if we ban guns, people will get them illegally and then only the criminals will have guns!” 

I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know what we should do to fix this. I just know that I am an educator and I am so tired and so sad and so heartbroken and I’m writing this while blinking back sobs because I am so tired of seeing kids in the crosshairs and I’m so sick of teachers having to become martyrs to save the lives of their students. It’s heartbreaking. It’s horrific. It’s inhumane. It needs to stop. This has been going on for so long…and it just needs to stop. We could really use a hero right about now…if only they were real. So for now, hug your kids tight. Pray that they make it to adulthood, I guess. Thoughts and Prayers.

Feels Like Home

Right now, I'm sitting at my regular café in Ifrane and my life is about to change again in just a few weeks. For the past three and a half years, I have lived in this small, college town and have made a home for myself here. While I'm gearing up to move to a new city with a new job, to begin a new chapter of my life, I find myself reminiscing more than usual. (I am the kind of person who is almost haunted by memories, usually the good kind with a tinge of sadness and regret at missing whatever or whoever I'm thinking of). 

This started because a Facebook post popped up on my feed about Colonel Robert Shaw. For those who do not know him, he is emblazoned in history as the leader of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, an all-black regiment made of freed men of the time after the Emancipation Proclamation by Governor Andrew. His story, and the stories of his men, were famously brought to the silver screen in the movie Glory. In Boston, right in the middle of the Suffolk University "campus" (because our campus was basically just Beacon Hill) there was a monument to Colonel Shaw and the 54th regiment. Suddenly, I was standing on the corner of Beacon and Park Streets, waiting for the light, heading to the Dunkin Donuts across the street. Of course, I live abroad but as the historian in my can't help but try to re-orient myself when curiosity strikes me, so I pulled up a map. Then it's like I'm back in college 15 years ago...

But now writing about it, I'm realizing I was brought back to college a few hours ago. I was watching something online and someone was complaining about the smell of dryer sheets wafting around in the clean morning air, and how it was basically air pollution. Immediately (and I mean that moment you get almost yanked by the hair to a memory), it was 2005 and I was walking across the busy main road to Temple Street and there was a vent at the bottom of Temple that wafted that same smell. To me it was like someone sprinkled candy in the air. My mother had long since stopped using any scented laundry detergent or softener, so smelling it was something I genuinely missed. I was sitting on one of the stone blocks placed between large wooden flower planters, listening to the guy who used to stand at the end of the street and play the harmonica sometimes. Now, fully engulfed in this schlep through my memory, I learned that the Derne Street Deli had closed. I remembered they had this ham and cheese sub that I used to adore, and I used to rely on this place for lunch very regularly. I was a commuter from about an hour outside of Boston, so I packed my schedule into 3-4 days and one semester I remember I was there from 8am to about 10pm...just...yikes. 

Suddenly I find myself about 2 blocks away at the corner of Ashburton and Bowdoin. I'm walking in front of cars to cross Bowdoin, heading to my work-study office at the Government Department on Ashburton finishing my roughly 10-15 minute walk from North Station. There on the corner, is Capitol Coffee House, one of my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE places in this area. I found myself almost sending a message to them, despite the fact that it has been over a decade and there is no way in hell they remember me, just to tell them how much their little place meant to me. The number of times I finished that walk and grabbed myself a much needed coffee before getting to the office. The steak and cheese subs I worshipped over the years. Their croissant breakfast sandwiches where the bacon was so perfectly cripy that watching me eat one was bordering on inappropriate. And my all-time favorite embarrassing memory of them, when my jaw was wired shut and I was so desperate for something I wanted to eat (or rather drink) that I ordered their cheese and broccoli soup and ended up looking like I had eaten Swamp Thing at the office. The small pieces of broccoli did not magically squeeze between my teeth, but instead became stuck in the net of elastics holding my braced teeth together. Not ideal, but hilarious for my friends at the Government Department who understood my desperation and just kindly told me to go brush my teeth. The point? It was always the little things. The places I frequented and became a regular customer and how wonderfully they were to me over the years. The smells and the sounds that make a place home, even for a short while. 

Now writing this, I find myself flashing back to the many places I have called home over the years. There are little things about these places that will always be near and dear to my heart. Mike, the guy who checked IDs at the Cantab Lounge in Central Square, Cambridge who would ask me every time I went when we were getting married. Sitting on the new patio at the The Field, sharing a beer with my roommates. The fact that my little spot in Bishop Allen Drive smelled like Indian food all summer because of the place across the street next to the Co-Op where I used to get spices in bulk for wicked cheap. The VFW where I worked and met so many of my friends, many of them much older veterans, when I moved to Amherst. Riding my bike all around the valley and strapping it to the front of the the PVTA busses. Going for late night post-drinks food at Local Burger. Grabbing a drink at the Yo Ol' Watering Hole in Northampton and striking up a conversation with strangers. 

I moved to Morocco with 4 bags of stuff and nothing else. Since August of 2018, I have made friends who border on being family. I am a regular at my shops. At my regular café, one of the waiters saw me once from a distance and held his thumb and forefinger apart to indicate "Coffee?" and I ordered with a thumbs up. I know people's names, I see them around town, I've met some of their families just in passing on the street. I celebrated my birthday with the family who lives in the house my apartment is in. I cannot express how comfortable I have become and how much I love my life here. But remembering all the places I've called home, it conjures memories of how easily I am able to fit into new spaces. Suddenly, I'm slightly less scared to give up my life here and move forward. I wrote a poem when I was a kid about how I wished to be a vagabond, and now I'm seeing that although I do have permanent places to rest my head, home is wherever the wind blows...as long as I have my cats. 

 I've been thinking about this alot since I saw my post about Weightlessness. I wrote that years ago but it hit me like a bag of bricks. I cried as much as when I found out a friend and my cat died. It just crushed me that I used to feel like this. And then I thought about it really deeply. 

I am deeply happy in Morocco. Example...my headphones died and I showed up at the only tech guy in town and said "headphones?" with a smile and he just handed me exactly what I needed. I can show up to my chicken guy and say "Wajad djej?" and he knows I need a chicken and we can mime to each other whether I need it butchered or whole. I have a fabulous produce dude who is way too expensive but always gives me free samples and won't let me buy anything but the tops. I have a butcher who I can (QUITE LITERALLY) see how fresh my beef is. 

I ran into a friend at the market and I swear it was the sweetest thing you've ever seen. This will be a very short post but I am incredibly lucky to be who and where I am right now. I also always have my cats...so there is always that...

Weightless

Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if it was as easy as a swingset.  

When I was a kid, a swingset was Mecca for me.  I could pump my legs and for the first time, in my I-am-the-biggest-kid-on-the-playground-way, I could fly.  Also, since my previous life experiences of being dragged down by sexual abuse, I always felt like a swingset was the only place that I felt, weightless.  That and swimming (another weightless hobby) made me feel safe.  They were the places when gravity wasn’t pulling me back down to earth and making me a person that had to face reality.  When I was on a swing, I was a master of my own universe.  I  was the girl who could have found a (physically impossible) way to swing all the way around.  That’s how good I was.

So, imagine my surprise, when at the age of twenty-eight, drinking wine by myself on a Saturday night, I realized just how much that damn piece of plastic and metal meant to me.  Not only do I suffer from a deplorable amount of self-hate and derision, but an amazing amount of doubt.  I found myself walking to the swings tonight in the middle of the night, in need of guidance, and in need of weightlessness.  Now, I find myself compiling one of the most brutally honest pieces I have ever written.  I am a fraud.  

I spout how I want to help children succeed and I’m there for my kids and how I will give anything for them.  This is now the lie, because I would do any and all of those.  However, I do them for me.  This is the way I reassure myself that I have not failed in this world.  I tell people how well I’m doing, when in all reality, I’m never really good.

1

True Love

When I was younger, and even sometimes now, I always thought I needed true love to fix me.  We are constantly bombarded with this image of a helpless woman being saved by true love's kiss.  We're taught that a knight on a white horse is going to come pick up our broken pieces and put us back together.

          So I waited...

          And waited.......

I waited for someone to show up and somehow make me realize that I could be salvaged.  That I no longer had to be the sum of broken parts that I had become.  I waited for that person who I could come home to and spend my life with because I was shown that it was necessary.

I came to a fascinating and wonderful realization today (while dancing in the shower mind you) that you do not.  You do not need some person to come save you.  That person could try, but the only person who can save you, is you.

You do however, need true love.  My true love comes in numerous forms.  This is my love letter to you all and my thank you for somehow putting my pieces back together.

I have found myself in a place I never thought I would be.  I am in a place far from the friends and family I grew up next to.  I paved my own way here.  There was no ounce of recognition for the first few years I lived here and no one asked if I was related to Mel (my darling mother who held so many different jobs in town that I SWEAR she knew EVERYONE).  For a very long time, I felt alone.  And. It. Was. MARVELOUS.  There is something magical about when you finally find yourself alone after feeling like you answer to so many different souls.  There is something absolutely fantastic about leaving work and realizing you don't have to check in with anyone.  You are you're own person.  You are entirely free.

Then it happened.  I realized that I had somehow, over the course of years, surrounded myself with some of the most beautiful, kind-hearted, sarcastic, hilarious, glorious people I have ever met in my existence.  This is not to in any way discount the people who came before.  To those people, you brought me to this place.  You made it possible.  You did it.  However, the people surrounding me now make me feel like I can accomplish anything.  They make me feel like I can be this person with pieced glued back in and still be worthwhile.  True love did play a role in making me whole again, it just wasn't the true love of one person.  It was a symphony of love and caring and wonder from multitudes of people.

The people who sat and listened while I cried during the worst week ever.  The couple who sat with me the night before I had to move out of the apartment my boyfriend and I shared because we had broken up the previous week and I was so distraught over the concept that I drank until I couldn't see straight.  The various people throughout the past few years who have given me love and acceptance.

Most importantly, my family.  I have a wonderful mother, father, and sister who I adore and would give my life for.  But this is not for that family.  This is for the family I have created over the years.  The people I have slowly realized that I cannot live without...

My healing began with a bar full of regulars.  Sure, they were a little rough sometimes, but over the course of years they have become my people.  They are the people I love.  They are the people I cannot do without.  They have watched me soar and they have watched me plummet but no matter what happens, they have found a way to support me and hold my hand through it all.  They are the people you want to end the day with.  They are glorious and they have somehow brought me with them.  They have taught me to never question myself, to honor my own thoughts and opinions, and most importantly, to always be patient.

My healing continued because I became surrounded by the best teachers in the world.  Each year, I see teachers come and go.  We socialize, we get to know each other and we care about one another.  I have surrounded myself with some of the craziest bunch of people I know but they have all found a way to support me.  This year, I decided to stop hiding who I was and stop trying to make sure people were comfortable around me.  This year I decided to stand up and have a voice for all of us out there who were hurt my someone and never said a word because they didn't want to deal with the trouble of it all.  I look back on myself at 22, sobbing on a stoop, telling my dad for the first time.  I look back on the next day and the entire summer afterwards and having to relive it over and over again to try to get my mother to understand that I didn't blame her, it was out of her control, but of course I was pissed that it happened to me.  I don't know that girl anymore.

It feels wonderful.

Do I still feel sad and lonely sometimes?  Of course.  But I'm me again.  More than that, I think I'm the best version of me that I have ever been.  This is because of my family.  My hundreds of dysfunctional people family.  The people who I have told about my life who choose to love me and support me because of it (not despite it).

The point...find the people you love who will love you back unconditionally.  I've learned that none of us have just one true love, we have many.  And that is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Pieces Of Me...

I came to a recent realization.  With the final milestone of acceptance about what happened to me as a child, things started to come into stark contrast to how I used to view them.  Life choices began making more sense with that added piece of the puzzle…

The nights spent so drunk that friends had to find me a ride home, laughing about how it was just the way I was.  The birthday where I spent a majority of it sleeping on a bed made of bar stools.  The countless one night stands and meaningless sex that had been happening for over a decade. 

It all came to me like the lightbulb to Edison (and probably took as many tries to perfect and fully understand its value): I had chosen years ago to not value myself and so I hid myself away behind a façade of someone who was not only willing but happy to oblige…always. 

With this realization, certain encounters began to come into an almost scary focus.  The time when I was basically passed out drunk and woke up in the middle of an encounter with a man and was so startled by what was happening that I ran out of the apartment so fast, I actually left my underwear behind.  The period of time when I would spend every weekend drunk with a friend and when his friends showed up, it was like I became the bottle they could pass around on a nightly basis.  The time that I was so drunk after a few whiskeys that I laid down on the sidewalk and had to get put into a cab to get home, had to basically be carried inside and woke up in a heap of blankets on the floor with no recollection how I got there, only to later realize that someone at the bar had roofied my drink.  Feeling trapped because I knew no-one would believe that I was roofied because I already had the label of “drunk party girl” permanently tattooed on my person.  The conversation with a “friend” after the fact when she told me, “It doesn’t matter how it happened, you ruined so-in-so’s perfect day.” 

All of these are situations where someone had chosen to take advantage of me.  All of these situations are moments in time that I am blamed for.  All of these stem from one simple idea: victim shaming.  In all of these scenarios, I was a victim.  I was not someone who should be judged, but treated with the same respect and dignity that is afforded to all people.  This is, however, not always the case, especially when, “she should know better”.  The worst thing about these situations (and these are only a very few examples of things that happened in the last 10 years), is that I carry these moments with me and feel guilty about the way people see me because of them.  It hurts to the core of my being that there are people in this world who see me as a piece of meat.  That see me as some trashy slutty party girl who will never grow up.  Who see me as a perpetual hurricane that just needs to be ridden out. 

And in these situations, it’s not just the fact that people see me as some sort of constant natural disaster of epic proportions.  It is also the fact that for brief moments in many, not all, of these encounters when I felt like perhaps this person was willing to take on the task of caring about me for who I am.  Of, maybe, just maybe, loving such a damaged and tumultuous being.  Even for a brief moment, the hope was more intoxicating than any alcohol or drug.  The hope that someone would possibly choose me, and love me, just because I exist as I do and not in spite of it.

So I write today to say no more.  I will no longer be the missing piece in whatever puzzle you have created for yourself.  I will not be the one to silently fill your void unless you are someone who is willing to fill mine.  It is not selfish.  It is self-preservation.  I cannot continue to feel guilty because I was not enough. 

I was enough.  I will always be enough.  I will always be a sum of parts that doesn’t always fully add up to 100%.  I will constantly be a basketball player that will be good but will never be legendary, despite their best effort.  I will be the person who seems to live with perpetual nightmares and seems to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders, but I will not bow, I will not bend, I will not break. 

I will no longer go quietly into the night, spending hours or days or weeks or months or maybe even years feeling guilty about how you see me.  I will no longer try to help you fill the voids that your own life and your own damage have given you while you completely choose to ignore the choices I have made with my life and why.  If you choose not to really see, that is your prerogative.  Mine will be to continue to carry that weight and to walk through life like the champion I am, and never, like a victim again.

The Bubble

There is a saying.  Maybe not a saying.  Maybe it's just become a crazy internet meme (which to my generation is just as good as a saying).  True friendship is one that can have no contact for excessive amounts of time but when you do see each other, it's like you never left each other.  I have been lucky enough to have witnessed this in my life.

It was a Sunday afternoon when I picked him up from the train station.  We had made the decision to take an impulsive and impromptu road trip during the summer because we both had time off and a couple of bucks saved up.  So after 2 years of not seeing each other, and only the rare and unexpected phone calls or text messages, we set sail, so to speak.

To preface this story, I have become a loner in the last few years.  I have gotten very comfortable with my life at home, and have been in the same place for years now.  Over the past year, I have settled down with my roommates and I have been very content with how my life has ended up.  There are moments of emptiness and difficulty, there can be no other way in a life like mine, but I have surrounded myself with a group of people who are so absolutely spectacular that I have convinced myself that I am happy here.  If I am not in immediate peril, I am always content.

So, used to my solitude, I agreed to a road trip with one of my best friends.  We have been through a lot together.  I have seen him through his struggles and he has always been kind and supportive through mine so I could only assume that a road trip together would be epic.  I was not wrong.

In true impulsive fashion, we left like thieves in the night at one o'clock in the morning.  He turned to me and said, "Are we doing this?!" and my only thought as to a response was, "Hell yes!"  So we left, filled the tank and were headed south in my small hatchback.  I was in a trance for the first leg of the journey and when we finally realized how long we'd been in the car, we were in New Jersey.  I looked at him from the driver's seat and said, "We could always turn around...this seems like a really stupid idea now..."  He insisted that we needed this.  I believed him and he was in no way wrong...

So we continued.  I took pictures all the way down (one in particular will always be my my favorite of me flipping off a "Virginia is for Lovers" sign) and we ventured like no one else ventured before.  We got caught in rainstorms that I could have only fathomed without witnessing it, we got caught in traffic as a reaction to the worst car crash we have ever seen.  We saw giant lifted southern trucks and the funniest bumper stickers we've ever witnessed.  He had the bladder of a tiny child and constantly had to pee, so our final stop on the way was at a truck stop off of 59 in Mississippi where he told me he had the most scenic and wonderful pee of his life.  While I was in the car, however, there was the a truck creeping up to the driver's side of the car and I immediately swapped seats and shouted for him to get in the damn car.

So regardless of our delightful drive down, we finally got down to New Orleans.  We're driving over bridges bigger than I've ever seen in my entire life.  We're driving by palm trees (PALM TREES!) which for a kid from Massachusetts is something entirely new.  We finally get into New Orleans and each of us washes the road off (and trust me, it was some nasty stuff).  We go out and grab a drink, because New Orleans is supposed to be a constant party.  The whole plan was about going to New Orleans.  It was all about going to the birthplace of some of the best music in the country.  It was all about getting some serious creole food.

The trip became something wholeheartedly different during our time.  There was a moment on this trip.  A moment that I'm not even sure that I am willing to be honest about right at this moment.  There are very few people in this world who I love unconditionally.  There are very few people that I trust completely with my life and my soul and my person.  He is one of them.  It was a complicated realization to come to.  I am not sure how it actually happened.  We went out drinking for a night and I don't remember the last time I felt so completely connected to another person.  I know that it was a whiskey fueled night, but I genuinely can't remember feeling so deeply for another person and genuinely trusting them with me.  I trust very rarely.  This was a feat.

And then we were back on the road.  We made awesome time and I was in full road-trip beast mode.  I hurried back, probably because I was scared and I had every right to be.  I am back in my bubble right now, and I am miserable.  I spent 7 whole days with another person, non-stop, without apology.  I was myself, I was not putting on a front as I so often do.  I spent 7 days being myself and being with this person.  Now, as I sit in my self-prescribed isolation, I find myself so lost.  I find myself listening to music we heard on the trip and bringing myself back to Virginia.  I find myself listening to podcasts that were suggested by him.  I find myself not sure what to do with my days now that we are not visiting shady, creepy gas stations selling ninja stars.  I find myself suddenly not enthused by my sheltered little bubble.  I wish so desperately that I was back on the road.  I wish we were witnessing box-men.  I wish we were dancing in the car, completely damaged.  I would even wish to be a sloth over this uneventful sadness.

I am now sitting in my bubble realizing that somehow I may have acquiesced to mediocrity.  I spent 7 days with another person and loved them more for it.  This is something that I was not sure if I was capable of doing.  This has rocked me to my core because I have spent years just assuming that I am incapable of being around another human being for an extended period of time.  I assumed that apparently because of who I am and what I've gone through, I will die alone.  I have joked about it since I was young (see Recluses, Eccentrics, and Babies) but I started to genuinely believe it as time has gone by.  I don't necessary think I am the kind of person who will ever be, just happy.  I will never be, just happy.

I also have very little patience for other people.  I find myself back in my bubble trying to make lists of things that pissed me off about him, but it doesn't help.  It was the first time that in spite of his flaws, in spite of his problems, I was just happy to be near him.  I was happy to have someone with me who I knew loved me as I am.

This road trip gave me a few things.  It gave me the hope that someday, I can actually be a fully functioning person again.  It also gave me the realization that I am in it for the story and I will always be an exploratory person who is so willing and excited to do as much stupid stuff as is possible before I die.  It also reminded me of the kinds of friends I deserve.  I deserve a person who loves me as much as I know he does.  I deserve friends who will love me because of my flaws and not in spite of them,  Because, what New Orleans and this road trip taught me, I'm pretty fucking awesome.