I am three people. Maybe more; it’s hard to know for
certain. Through the days I participate in each life and wonder how long I
can be each person without blowing my cover.
I am like a double agent, living
these lives and avoiding their intersection. It’s not easy, and it isn’t that I
like it or that I’m sure it is necessary, but this is my life.
I am a nursing student at Northern
Michigan University. I’m not sure that I fit in, but when I think about it, I
don’t think anyone feels like they do. NMU is made up of many nontraditional
students. I am not the oldest student, I am not the only mother, and, if I
investigated enough, I’d find that I don’t have the strangest political views.
I spend my days on campus looking
up drug information on my kindle and searching through pages of notes on
pathology before learning the proper way to give a geriatric patient a bed
bath. Being a nursing student is a juggling act. But so is my entire existence.
I am the mother of two little
girls, beautiful blonde imps with strong personalities. I wash their smudged
faces, make them dinner, read them books, and play dinosaurs on the dubious-smelling
carpeting in their bedrooms. Their father and I work together to get them into
bed, struggling with their wriggling bodies to brush their teeth. When they are
comfortably tucked in for the night, falling asleep as they “read” to themselves,
we sneak off to enjoy some alone time. This life I know, and although I’m never
certain I’m doing the right thing, it’s the life that I feel most certain in.
The map I’ve plotted with my intentions for life has changed with every passing
year, but my first strong memories include wanting to be a mother. There is
much to be said of watching your genetic material grow into a full-fledged person.
I am an aspiring author, who fights
off hordes of doubt with the tip of a pen. I consider story ideas with every
moment of silence and behave, underneath it all, much like a researcher as I watch
the behaviors of the people in my other lives. I underline sentences in books that
steal the breath from my lungs:
“The weapons that my enemies raised against me
are venerated in hell as holy relics;
Plans that my enemies made against me are
preserved as holy texts;
Blood that I shed upon ancient battlefields is
scraped from the stained earth by Hell’s sacristans and placed in a vessel of
silver and ivory.
I gave magic to England, a valuable
inheritance…”
Jonathon
Strange and Mr. Norrell
I devote an hour a day to paper and
feel empowered when my pen glides across the page with great,
inexorable ease. This is the life I feel the least confident in, but it’s the
life I love with all my soul.
Someday these lives might all come
together, and I can be one whole person instead of three, but perhaps not. Maybe
I’ll just become more people instead, and treat each life as a research
opportunity. After all, “Writing is a socially acceptable form ofschizophrenia.”
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