o captain, my captain!

I want to be cool and I want to care!

novel enrichment turned one last week! Wherever you’re reading from, or whenever you joined me here on Substack—thank you.

Born to yawp, forced to work

The summer before I started high school, we didn’t have cable. To combat this, I was tasked with going to the library and checking out DVDs from the 80s and 90s (and all seasons of Lost, perhaps as a palette cleanser). I watched Mermaids, Good Will Hunting, How to Make an American Quilt and revisited my John Hughes favorites.

The first unit of my freshman year English class was centered around an NPR series called “This I Believe,” which invited its contributors to tell stories that shaped their core beliefs—a celebration of individualism. To coincide with this theme, my teacher fit in a screening of Dead Poets Society.

Dead Poets Society became an immediate favorite of mine, and I was surprised it was skipped over in my nostalgia-driven movie marathon of the previous summer. But as I said in a previous letter, some things find us when we need them most, rather than the other way around.

It was that formative school year in which I started exclusively associating April with National Poetry Month. I’d anxiously await April’s arrival with the same excitement as my birthday, so I could order the official National Poetry Month poster from the Academy of American Poets website.

Earlier this month, I came across a New Yorker article from 2022, titled “Becoming You” by Joshua Rothman. The piece itself is an exploration of remembering ourselves as we get older, and the accuracy of our own memory.

He wrote, “And yet sometimes we recall our former selves with a sense of wonder, as if remembering a past life. Lives are long, and hard to see. What can we learn by asking if we’ve always been who we are?”

Last fall, while visiting my mother, she gave me two bags of things from high school that I never thought I’d see again once I stopped living with her. I went home with a literal time capsule—cards, notes from friends, Instax photos, and the notebooks I carried with me everywhere.

After having moved so many times, I was happy to be reunited with relics from a different era of my life. I combed through journal entries that went all the way back to that tumultuous freshman year, chuckling at my revelations. But I was also shocked at how hard I was on myself—more specifically, how I thought I was being perceived, based on how much enthusiasm I showed about my interests.

When it comes to the continuation of the self, it’s easier to remember who we were before by the things that were important to us at the time—the people, places, and things we liked.

There is a truth to this that I don’t think will ever go away, as it has become popular for our interests to be microcosms of our personalities, especially online—but being passionate about something leads to forming connections, even if we have to do the scary thing and reach out first, or make a post that’s coming from a place of sincerity.

Goodness isn’t an heirloom. 

I don’t know what I inherited from my parents.

Science says I’m made up of halves of them. 

I think living is filling up the space between those halves,

But I don’t know if I’m good at it. I’m still learning. I’m clumsy, especially with how I feel. 

-An excerpt from the the last poem I wrote, in 2019

All these years later, I’m thankful for my English teacher and his following in Mr. Keating’s footsteps—challenging a group of impressionable teenagers to look inside themselves. Having just moved back to Cleveland at the time, and rejoining a school district I hadn’t been a part of since first grade, my lifeline was geeking out over poetry, whether I was reading or writing it.

It’s because of poetry that I’m able to nourish my former selves rather than feel self-conscious about them. I was once a ruffle-socked little girl reciting a Shel Silverstein poem at a school event, then a moody teenager scribbling about debilitating crushes and reading W.H. Auden, and a hopeful undergrad student attending open mics.

That childlike giddiness I associated with April is still with me, but it means something different. A school year isn’t ending, my stomach isn’t doing somersaults on the eve of a field trip—I won’t be that young again. But the sun is being more generous, there is candlelight and half-finished cocktails and more opportunity to sit across from people dear to me and let the things we say to each other simmer. And I’ll do my best to remember it all.

O captain, my captain—I want to be unapologetic about the things I love. I don’t care if I come off as cheesy or pretentious or even annoying—nor should you.

• “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limón

• “The Orange” by Wendy Cope

• “To You” by Frank O’Hara

• “[Like a white stone]” by Anna Ahkmatova

• “Just Walking Around” by John Ashbery

• “All My Friends Are Sad & Bright” by Cameron Awkward-Rich

This newsletter is in bloom. Share the last thing you read that made you feel alive.