I don’t need this space anymore. This fact occurred to me one of these evenings of the holiday fortnight, as I sat plowing through page after page of secondary literature on Victorian sexuality—my mind not off in the land of my own identity construction, but rather very much focused on the task at hand, trying to ensure that I can satisfy my advisor and myself with my synthesis of the historiography underlying the first major project that will certify me as a historian.

I have been turning a corner, all this long 2010: a year spent quietly in bedrooms and libraries and at dinner-tables, but a year I’ve spent thus because I find myself, slowly but surely, coming home. I haven’t spent so very long away, to be sure, but in my mind over the past few years I’ve been working through different ways of thinking, different ways of being, and different ways of wanting. Over this year I’ve been tying those threads together just the way I’ve been coalescing disparate historical ideas into a thesis project. I’ve been realizing that when I grow up I want to live the life I lived when I was three years old and happy, full of intellectual and imaginative pursuits and domestic, family warmth. I’ve been building homes wherever I go: little nests of coziness that stretch from British Columbia to New Jersey, from Rhode Island to California, and more besides; picking up families other than the one into which I was born; and learning to appreciate the one in which I was born more than I ever have before. In just two scarily short weeks, I’ll carry that process in a 747 over the Atlantic, and I’ll build a new home in Trinity College, Oxford. The enduring nature of my tendency to make homes means it is always heart-wrenchingly hard to leave them, and sometimes (well, most of the time) I don’t know how it is that anyone could ever conceive of the art of losing as not being hard to master. I certainly felt trying to master it reduce me to tears six months ago, when I packed into boxes one Princeton home with a window seat on the fourth floor over an archway. I certainly have begun to feel it beat upon me as I think about the grim task that awaits me when I return to reduce to boxes another Princeton home with a couch on the second floor on a quiet quad. No doubt I’ll feel it six months hence when I must reduce home to boxes again, and return to this side of the Atlantic.

But with every home I break to bits, I find myself inching closer to the home inside. I find myself becoming more grounded, more certain. When I read my books and write my words, I no longer need a parent or a professor to tell me every step of the way that I’m a precious snowflake and that I sound cleverer than any of the other snowflakes. This year, I’ve developed an inner core of self-reliance, I’ve begun to see myself as a scholar with a vocation, and I’ve begun to harden myself against the paranoid delusion that the people I love and esteem most are the ones who think I’m the stupidest. I’ve started to turn the mentoring tables, to give back to my parents actual and surrogate by adopting some charges and watching them grow into intellectually curious, discerning, humane people who care for others and for themselves with extraordinary depth. I’ve begun to understand, really, what people mean when they say they are thankful. I’ve edged closer to beginning to wrap my head around what people mean when they say they love someone. I’ve begun to guess that I’m not quite ready to read Middlemarch now, but that I will be very soon.

It is troubling, though, that with all this identification of what I have has also come identification of what I lack. 2010 has not been without its aching absences, its empty voids less immediately soul-shattering but ultimately far more disconcerting than the difficulties of saying goodbye before another move. With the other trappings of early adulthood come the sharp stabbing paralyzing fear of loneliness: if it is home for which I am looking, home for which I am headed, with whom will I share home? If I am beginning to know what it means to love, how do I say so in plain English? How can I whose province is words marshal all my verbal faculties to communicate to those who need to know—and only they—what emotional fulfillment I yearn for aside from the joy of seeing my “students” think and grow?

I don’t yet know the answers to these questions, and though it worries me how slow my progress on them seems, I do know that with time comes resolution to the crises of time itself, of growing older. I also know that the time has gone when I felt so alone that the only way I had to prevent my fears from eating away at my insides was to broadcast them to the entire internet, and I hope it has gone forever. Though I am profoundly grateful to the internet for being my lifeline when I had nothing else, I no longer need it for the same reasons. On Facebook, I communicate with many people whose names I know, for whom I care, and who care about me; via email, with its attendant .edu or .ac.uk suffix, I stay connected to the goings-on of my institution(s) of higher learning. Anonymity isn’t something I need right now—hopefully, the next time I’ll need to assume its cloak online, it’s because I’ll be up for tenure.

In March 2008, when I was a senior in high school, I so badly felt the need to teach, that I started a “People’s School” in which to do it. Its life was brief—it lasted two full-Saturday sessions—but in those two Saturdays I brought together every teenager I could convince to come to my house and teach the group something, whether it be crocheting or Beatles trivia or math games or coffee connoisseurship. I myself only taught one rather unsuccessful topic, a brief lecture and singalong on the music of the civil rights movement, which I’d improvised at the last minute because someone didn’t show. I was too nervous to debut my lecture on the history of gay activism that would in the years to come morph into a much more theoretical disquisition on how we construct politicized minority identities, and would become a dinner-table staple. But though I only partially realized it at the time, my People’s School topic was the “meta” one: my friends learned that they had the power to teach and to learn, and that intellectual engagement was valuable for its own sake, a lesson our assessment-outcomes-based high school certainly wasn’t teaching us. When I was 18 and doubted I’d get into college, much less be proud of myself when I got there, I knew what I was doing to rebel against my high school. It was the only world I knew, and I hated it. But the idea that what I was doing to empower my friends as teachers could also be empowering me didn’t really stick. Now 2010 is ending, and there have been five semesters of college, and I am spending the Christmas holiday doing original research, and through everything that I have learned in reading and writing and researching since March 2008 it’s become clear I don’t need to post on a blog to tell myself that I’ve been learning and teaching since I was three years old—and that after all these years, I’m coming home.

I started out this disquisition by saying that I don’t need this blog anymore, and I finished this disquisition on a familiar self-reflective, self-absorbed, interior-monologue note that suggests I haven’t left years of self-fashioning too far behind quite yet. So what do I mean? Well, I am going to release myself of any sense of obligation to post here; my feeling that I ought to do an end-of-the-year post, as I have every year since 2004, may be the last “assignment” I set myself. I’ll have enough of those in the coming terms, when I’ll have to produce an essay a week.

Instead, I am going to return to reading and writing about Victorian sexuality, and as the spirit moves me I will post to tell my audience how I find Oxford. Every student studying abroad needs a blog for photos and for culture shock and for the expression of surprise that after years of listening to Radio 4 and other symptoms of inveterate Anglophilia, she isn’t as inured to British culture as she might have thought. So no, I’m not going anywhere—and actually, all things said, I expect I’ll continue on very much as before. After all, I might have programmed “home” into the metaphorical GPS, but it’s still “calculating route.” I’m certainly not there yet.

It’s exactly twelve noon on the first Saturday in December. I’m sitting on the couch, drinking my morning coffee, pretending it’s still morning. The window is surrounded with multicolored LED Christmas lights, and through its panes I can see the dully grayscale palette of stone and slate, leafless trees, and overcast sky. Last night I went to hear the Glee Club’s Christmas concert, next week is the American studies holiday party, the week after that is the Chapel Choir’s Messiah singalong, and then on December 17 at 5:30 in the morning I head northwest for my family Christmas. I’ve been doing my duty by half my ethnicity and culture, lighting the Hannukah candles night by night, but in reality it’s Christmas I’ve been dreaming about (literally); blurry twinkling images of poinsettias and paper hats and gingerbread trifle and sparkling wine keep permeating my unconscious. The temperatures are hovering in the high 30s and I’ve pulled out my shapeless brown parka to wear on my predictable circuit from home to history department to hall to library to co-op to home again. This weekend I need to put in eight-hour library days finishing a draft of my fall-term junior paper, and somehow by 5:30am on December 17 I’ll have written 30-35 pages of real, original historical scholarship. Somehow.

A lot has changed this semester, and though I haven’t written about it, I do find myself becoming a different person. Between my JP and the first stirrings of life in my thesis, my academic work has become much more real, substantial, and mature; my relationships with my various official and unofficial advisors demonstrate this. The writing I produce is no longer purely training exercises—and somehow with that sense of reality comes the melting away of some of my crippling insecurities, and comes a feeling of confidence based in the idea that if anyone has the right to go to graduate school and to use a Ph.D. for good, I certainly do. And with this comes the desire to suddenly wear many more collared shirts and v-neck sweaters and clothes that fit, and so it was that when I went to CVS last week and bought a lighter for the Hannukah candles, the cashier didn’t ask to see my ID.

In the past few days, sensing the semester drawing to a close, friends and professors have started to ask me whether I’m getting ready to go to Oxford. And I suppose I am, though I’ve barely confronted the massive logistical nightmare of packing up my belongings in just a couple days, finding homes for my furniture, and choosing which things I’ll put in my two suitcases with which to make a life across the Atlantic for seven months. But with pretension to academic adulthood comes readiness to see a new university with—quads and gates and porters’ lodges notwithstanding—more permeable borders, less geographically deterministic social lives. I’ve been consuming British television at an alarming rate, watching my British friends’ mannerisms and language more carefully than ever before, doing what I can to ease the culture shock before I go. And most importantly, I’ve been salivating over my Hilary-term reading list, preparing myself to learn all sorts of wonderful things, and thrilling at the many unscheduled hours in which I’ll have time to learn, and to start my work each day before 8pm.

I sense—in a way which was not true when I first arrived at college—that I am starting to move out of adolescence into young adulthood. There are many things about this which I do not like, and many things about which I feel uncertain, but I feel as if I’m starting to Get It, to understand how to maintain control. My life’s familiar routines shift imperceptibly: for instead of listening with wide-eyed wonder at the self-assured impartation of knowledge, it is now I who know enough to hold forth confidently at the dinner table on matters of historical, literary and queer-theoretical fact. And instead if going to parties because I feel I must, because it’s What People Do, I go to them because I want to, and I let the expenditure of energy carry me through to the next omelette in the dining hall on a sunny Sunday morning, and the next long day of synthesizing primary sources.

Between just such academic and social demands, it has taken 24 hours to finish writing even this autobiographical stream-of-consciousness of a Status Update, and it is now a sunny Sunday morning, and I am finishing my coffee, and I am in just a few minutes going to go downstairs and seek out the omelette and bagel I’ve been eating every Sunday in Princeton for two and a half years. But the real joy and comfort will come after the omelette, when I’ll lug a tote bag full of books into the bowels of the library and work an eight-hour day of writing down words which no one’s ever said before about the politicization of 19th-century American womanist thought.

In short, at 20 years old (nearly 21, I tell myself in my more optimistic moments), I have the best life and the best future prospects for which anyone in their early 20s could hope, and I’m profoundly thankful for it. “It gets better” is not just about the isolation of LGBT youth and the merits of the teleological coming-out narrative; it’s about any circumstance under which you can look at your life and love it and yourself to an extent which never seemed possible in the awful, dark days of high school. Let this stand as an object lesson in the power of the humanities to do the greatest good.

for:

A dear friend with whom to spend this most family of holidays
His house and his town, which feel like my home
My newfound ability to make pie crust
My family, who can always be relied upon to remember me even though I live thousands of miles away
Aestheticism and decadence and the day I discovered them on the wall of the National Gallery in Washington
Folk music and its attendant political and moral values
The academic discipline which makes me myself
Friends who keep me from getting trapped too far inside it
The men who a hundred and fifty years ago read Plato, telling me how to read myself
Wool blankets and wood fires
Laughter, tears, and the rest of human emotion
A life of the best mentors and teachers anyone could ask for
A stomach full of autumn fruits and vegetables
Self-reliance
The humanities and humanity
Love
Hope
Freedom
Beauty

When I was about twelve, I had a rich inner life as an apprentice in a guild of tradespeople, into whose society I was welcome and whose social cues I was able to intuit. I wrote many stories—even a short novel—about myself and this guild and its culture, and every day as I went through the motions of my middle-school life, a constant interior monologue transplanted those motions into the world of my guild and my apprenticeship.

This week in my historiography seminar, we read Robert Darnton’s classic cultural history The Great Cat Massacre, and we talked for three hours, in part about guilds and tradespeople and their world. My professor made a joking analogy between the world of 18th-century printers and the world of 21st-century academics, but it wasn’t until I was sitting this afternoon in a windowless storage room in the library basement, affixing Princeton University Library bookplates to shipments from Blackwells for $12.95 an hour, that my interior monologue began to shape my life according to the metaphor of apprenticeship. My cautious forays into the forms and contents of historical scholarship, my careful attention to the details of social behavior (and self-hatred when I screw up those details and the rules by which they operate), and my constant sense that I stand on the edge of a culture to which I almost-but-not-quite belong, all seem to me to have the characteristics of apprenticeship, as do the clearly laid-out steps I must take on the road to professorship and the simultaneous probability that I will drop off the path before I actually attain that goal.

I have been thinking this week about how challenging I find change, and the processes of letting go and moving on and moving away, and the way my life at times, absent any home base or sense of real rootedness, seems at times to be a constant quest for home. (We are studying the Freudian uncanny this week in my psychoanalytic theory class, but it wasn’t until I realized how I have so many unheimlich homes, and so many heimlich points of transience, that I saw beyond the immediate gothic implications of the term.) In recent months I’ve found the question “Where are you from?” harder and harder to answer, as I add to my list of experiences more and more places where I’ve felt at home for a time, and then suddenly felt sense of home ripped away from me, as it was when I left the fourth floor over the archway with its attendant window seat last June. The art of losing is very hard indeed to master, and it is just as hard to accept the lack of rootedness that comes with being in one’s early twenties and going very much through the process of trying to define who and what one is.

It is for this reason that, while bookplating this afternoon, I found the apprenticeship metaphor comforting. If each leaving of home is another step in the route back home, along the road to professorship and perhaps someday a life where I stay long enough in one place to acquire a cat or a dog and maybe even a little house, it becomes a little less terrifying and traumatizing to float all by oneself in a haze of uncertainty, constantly hovering on the outside of social situations and consumed by nervousness about plunging in. If I know that I will arrive back home someday, I can feel freer to assume a sense of agency and to pursue my own life, independent of my worries about whether anyone else thinks I’m clever or likable or good at critical theory.

And of course, since I try not to be needlessly self-indulgent in this space, I would recommend this approach to my readers, should there be any, as well—particularly those who (and I think this happens more often than we let on) see their real adult lives to bear a striking familiarity to their imaginary childhood ones.

I apologize for my lengthy radio silence, but when you’ve been on the go from 10:00am to 7:30pm, as I was today, and then have to come home and do homework and research, there’s not a lot of time for blogging. That said, I was moved to comment about a post on the Paris Review blog which to me makes a spurious argument. The writer, Sarah Bakewell (who, her bio explains, has written a biography of Montaigne) argues that blogging is a form of essayistic writing, and then traces a potted history of the essay which drops the names of many of the key literary figures of the recent western canon, but doesn’t entirely explain what Hazlitt and Lamb, interesting though they are, have to do with the blog.

The reason for this is simple, I think, and that’s because comparing “the blog” and “the essay” is comparing apples and oranges, or perhaps more accurately apples and the Platonic ideal of the taste of apples (I think?). “The blog” is a medium; “the essay” is a genre. In the 21st century, essays might well be published on blogs, but so might journal entries or hard reporting or political rants or requests for donations to a given non-profit. I can’t identify any particular stylistic or generic traits embodied by every single subdomain of wordpress.com, for instance, and I’ll bet that if you think about what you read online every day you couldn’t either. The New York Times‘ blogs are different from your friends’ study abroad blogs, which are different still from blogs about fashion or popular culture; I’ll bet that very few of us read on a regular basis blog posts which we could actually compare to the work of (to take one of these figures whose essays I’ve actually read) Charles Lamb. This is not to say that these blogs don’t exist, but rather that they exist amidst a wide variety of other blogs belonging to other generic categories, just as the essays Lamb or Montaigne wrote existed amidst various other parts of the world of publishing and literary dissemination in their eras.

When I first started writing a public blog in high school, I thought of myself as an essayist. I wrote about what happened in my life and what I was thinking about in ways which didn’t quite fall into the chronological here’s-what-I-did-today paradigm. But as I read real essays and realized that what I did was a great deal more self-absorbed and inward-focused than is usual for a genre which seems actually to be not only much more constructed and planned than my streams-of-consciousness, but also much more focused on the author’s relationship to the external world, I realized that what I write may be interior monologue, but it’s not really Montaignean essay at all. The use of the first person (if the essayist chooses to use the first person) does not necessarily mean that the ego, or whatever the right psychoanalytic term is, will loom large in the written piece. Rather, it seems to me as if it functions more as an entry point into an externalized set of circumstances or ideas, one with which the reader can follow along. What I write, more often than not, isn’t that; there’s too much “me” in it—though, to be sure, that “me” has receded as my style and indeed my sense of self has evolved. And, furthermore, in the most literal sense of “essay”—its root in essayer—what you read in this space does tend to represent my attempts to articulate ideas, trying them out before I would, say, let them inform the theoretical side of my academic work, or give them to a reporter for a quote in a news article. The way I understand my own blog (and again, I’d distinguish this from “blog” in general, which is still a medium capable of containing many understandings) is perhaps as a self-works-in-progress lunch talk series: regular updates of evolving intellectual identity, and requests for feedback (though I don’t, I’m sorry to say, provide sandwiches or even Diet Cokes). But though authorial voice of course looms centrally in the work of real essayists, it doesn’t rest entirely upon the ego. As we all learned in high-school English, the author’s voice is separable from the real person who lived and died; to put it into college-level terminology, biography is distinct from literary criticism. In my own writing style, however, I think I’m a little less willing to make that distinction, and I guess that’s what makes me not-an-essayist.

So, I suppose, I’ll settle for “historian-in-training.” Perhaps contrary to Bakewell’s argument, not all of we bloggers will be Montaignes or Lambs, but we can all (as can anyone, blogger or not) cultivate our own gardens and act in accordance with their own inclinations. And with that, it’s time for another radio silence. I have some 19th-century intellectual history to write.