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"Health" was a dirty word.

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I went to the gym three times last week. I went to two group fitness classes and had a 1-1 personal training session. Some people may find this standard, but this is a big deal for me. The last time I went to the gym three times in one week was when I was in high school. At nearly 25 years old, I still have a recurring nightmare that I’m back in high school, and I’m told by my high school gym teacher that I have to go to gym class everyday for the rest of the semester in order to graduate. Gym class wasn’t necessarily scary for me, but it wasn’t my happy place. This wasn’t because of anything that my high school gym teachers did. They are gifted, lifelong athletes who have dedicated their lives to educate and empower their teams into achieving their goals and believe in themselves. When they were students, they broke records and won championships, and they manifest that for their students as well. I made up my mind at a young age that I would never consider myself an athlete. Memories ...
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"Wow, I do have friends"

This morning, I dropped my proverbial baby brother Sam off at the airport. After sleeping on my couch that he helped set up the night before, he changed his socks, checked over his overstuffed suitcase, moved some stuff to his backpack, and we headed to MSP on my way to work. He was leaving for Japan for his first job out of college as a teaching intern for math and science at a school in Tokyo. Before I watched him roll his suitcase away, he wrapped me in a hug and said, "See you soon." My eyes welled up as I continued driving to work. They welled up when he texted me, "We're taking off, love you," and they're welling up as I'm writing this after work while he's still on his flight. This year, I'm becoming more intimately familiar with my friends moving away. I'm trying to get better at maintaining friendships (both in person and long distance) better than I did when I was in high school and maybe even college. When I was a sophomore in high...
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I feel gross when I write songs.

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When I was a child, I would make up little tunes in my head. I played outside in the creek by my neighbors house or climbed the tree in our front yard. I sang all of the time (prompted or unprompted) but these little tunes were very private. I rarely let anyone hear them because, like many of my thoughts as young autistic child, I didn't think anyone would understand them.  To be fair, my child self had a point. The songs I wrote didn't make any sense. They were about the stupid things I wanted, like finally declaring my love for my second grade boyfriend after my parents told me I was too young to be dating anyone. Or working in the concession stand at a baseball game instead of watching it (this is while my dad coached baseball; I got bored pretty easily). I thought I was going to be the next Hannah Montana or Billy Joel's hype man. It was a dream that was my own and no one else's to crush. The TLDR: the worse I got bullied in elementary and middle school for things o...
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"Y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance"

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I love genius lyricism, and as a child of the aughts, I find myself going back to music I would hear on the radio or on my mom's iPod. Moreover, I'm amazed at how often the lyrics become proverbs of my daily life. Recently, a lyric from "Hey Ya!" by OutKast has been trending on social media: "Y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance." Andre 3000 (the genius that he is) uses it to back away from his heavy lyrics about people in unfruitful, unhappy relationships and jump back into the contagious joy felt in the rest of the song. It's beautiful and heartbreaking how self aware the Andre 3000 is. He knows that millions of people were not going to download this song and dance to it at weddings for the next two decades for depressing lyrics in a seemingly peppy song. I never read into this interjection at the beginning of the second chorus, but people are artfully inserting it into their conversations about justice and inclusivity. It resona...
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2021 from the eyes of an autistic college student

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A self-portrait titled "Trying my best" The start of 2021 has been chaotic. Upon writing this blog, I finished a degree recital with limited attendance, entered the back end of the most academically intense semester of my college career, and mended my broken heart of two months–as you'll see, each of these are important in illustrating my plight as an autistic college student. Spoiler alert: absolutely no one has their shit together, and I'm glad we're learning to stop trying to pretend like we are. For anyone that is relatively new in my life, I will attempt to sum up my experience as an individual with (incredibly poorly titled) "high-functioning autism." All of my life, I have been able to excel academically while trying to learn common patterns of behavior among neurotypical people. Individuals have recently described me as emotionally intelligent and outgoing. In all honesty: long periods of distance have stepped on my confidence. I'm getting th...
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Reflection on a devotion by a dear mentor

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While I was scrolling through Facebook, I heard a devotion from one of my bosses–now also a pastor–from my ol d summer camp. He spoke on texts related to Jesus and young children, particularly the ever-so-famous " Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these (Matthew 19:14, NIV)." Even though I wasn't in a particularly "theological" mindset, I paused and listened. I hadn't listened to a sermon since Christmas, and I thought it would be great to listen to a familiar voice. He was scrolling through a set of older camp photos, long before my time as a counselor. And as he was speaking, he asked the listeners to recall a time where they had nothing about a curiosity about the world and just wanted people to share in their delight. I started to think about the kids I counseled, and how they were experiencing the thrill of meeting brand new people and just getting to see people experience a new plac...
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Hearing music about immigrants and gay boys

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This photo is from a lecture in the class "Hidden Figures in Early Christianity" discussing the behavior of the dominant voices in antiquity, particularly public artwork representing other nations as sad, passive women holding up strong men. I thought it was relevant. All artists have a purpose. The most influential artists have power. Most of us are comfortable with this sentiment. The most impactful artists have an agenda. This is what troubles the casual listener. During my time in Nordic Choir this last year, we had the unique experience of preparing a full-scale oratorio titled "Considering Matthew Shepard," a work describing the tragic story of the murder of a young gay man. Harder yet, the work discussed the aftermath of the media, the backlash, the confrontation, the forgiveness, and the desire to move forward. As performers, doing this work was difficult. Many of the LGBTQ+ members of Nordic Choir reflected their own emotions about their worldly exper...
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