A Letter To Those I Know: I Am A Dreamer Of The Everlasting Dream

Dear Readers, who may or may not be hoping for a letter,

I like school. Kind of.

I go to a college that is extremely hard to get into; not Ivy League hard, but still pretty hard. Brigham Young University has a big rep. We have all the smart Mormon kids who were the super-nice valedictorians in their respective high schools (I wasn't a valedictorian, but I went to school with some super-smart people.) and we have kids who know the value of work because of Mutual and service projects and parents who made them do chores and we have former seminary presidents and first assistants in the Priests' quorums and Laurel presidents. People who are responsible and industrious and hard-working. We have sports teams renowned for their generally respectful behavior and we have musical groups, dance and vocal, that tour the world. We have a lack of Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper sold on campus. We have a foot of snow that's accumulated over a week's time and school when it's snowing heavily and when the sidewalks are made of ice. We have a mountain with a frickin' huge "Y" on it. We have Cosmo. We have red creme soda. We have Jimmer.

I really like it here. A lot of people I knew in high school were like, "I would never want to go to a big college. I want to go to this college, or this one." I know all the names. Penn State. Lebanon Valley College. Millersville. Kutztown. Shippensburg. York. Temple. West Chester. Lock Haven. When you grow up on the East Coast, and in Pennsylvania especially, you can't turn around but there's a college. And I think that the major problem with college educations and why they're so expensive is that there are too many colleges.

When I was a junior taking my PSATs and SATs, I put down for them to send my scores to BYU and BYU Idaho and maybe Utah State. I can't really remember. But despite the fact that those were my top three choices (if I had had three; there was really only one choice, and it had been my choice since I was twelve), I began getting tons of letters in the mail. Six a day sometimes. And twenty emails a day, that ranged from vaguely threatening to over-personalized to just plain begging. "Sarah, we want you to come to Bryn Mawr." (I didn't know this at the time, but Bryn Mawr is a pretty good school, it used to be a private women's college and I should have been quite flattered.) "Sarah, consider York College in your decision process." "Sarah, we want you here at Macdoodle-something-or-other." My SAT scores weren't even that good. My ACT score was great, but my SAT wasn't so hot. My GPA wasn't great either- I had something like a 3.6 or a 3.5 in high school. I had friends who had over a 4.0. I was like, "How do you do that?" They were even taking AP classes, too. I took two AP classes, and those were hard enough in and of themselves.

I once sorted through a cardboard box I kept most of these college letters in and I counted over a hundred different colleges. And some of them sent me five or six letters. Most sent me two or three.

It didn't really matter to me. They were mostly just really, really annoying. Like, I wanted them to stop sending me letters because when I applied for BYU (and BYU Idaho, I guess) I had this horrible three-month wait between my acceptance to BYU-I and BYU main campus where I was like "OH NO AM I GONNA GET IN I'M NEVER GONNA GET IN WHEN WILL THAT LETTER BE HERE" and it was senior year and we were doing Les Miserables in musical, which was also really stressful, and most of my friends already had their college admission letters copied and stapled to the pretty display wall we had for college admissions and I was panicking because it was like, the beginning of March and my dream school had said nothing to me at all about whether I was going there or not, and my dad was hinting that I better get ready for BYU-I and Rexburg and extremely cold temperatures, and I was like, "This is so not okay, I want to go to Provo, not Rexburg." And then it came one day, and I cried for joy because I wouldn't be going to Rexburg and I wouldn't be going to a school in Pennsylvania and I was going to my dream school.

Now you have to understand, there's nothing wrong with the colleges in Pennsylvania. There are just a lot of them. And my time in high school was hard enough because I was a lone Mormon among lots of very lovely non-Mormon people. And some of my friends understood that I didn't ever wear shirts where you could see my chest or tank tops without something over top or skirts shorter than my knee, and some of them asked me why I didn't drink coffee or tea, and some of them asked me questions about my religion.

And it was hard. I grew up with some very distinct values that were different from everybody else's values. I never watched a PG-13 movie without my parents present before I turned 13, and I have only seen a few R-rated movies and those were either edited or I didn't know they were rated R before I saw them. I didn't drink coffee or tea and I didn't swear regularly (although I've said bad words, at band camp and stuff, when I was feeling rebellious, and my attitude towards swearing in general is that the words don't matter, because they are meaningless expressions of emotion) and I wore clothes that covered all of my large, ungainly body and I didn't go on dates until I was sixteen and that included the single Homecoming and the single Prom I attended, where I went stag to Homecoming and with a friend to prom, and neither of those memories were as wonderful for me as everybody else seemed to find them. Sure, it was fun, but I would have been just as happy and much less emotionally drained if I had stayed at home and read a book.

And I didn't really date kids from school the way they dated each other. I watched all of my friends date each other and break hearts and create awkwardness, and I hated being fat and ugly and lonely and listening to them live... differently, from me. There were several distinct Sarahs at that point. There was school Sarah, who was also marching band and musical Sarah, and there was church Sarah, and there was family Sarah, and there was even just plain old Sarah, who is who I try to be now because that Sarah is me, truly and clearly.

I chose to move across the country and go to school in a place where I would only know a few people and where my family could only see me at Christmas and sometimes during the summer because I was tired of living differently from everybody else, from being hurt by the way I was different. Nobody tried to hurt me- I wasn't bullied or anything. I had a pretty idyllic high school career, actually. But I wanted to be near other people who had the same standards of living that I did. I wanted to be in a community where "dating" somebody didn't mean that you were "boyfriend and girlfriend," where the smell of coffee was gross because nobody else understood that where I was then, and where I didn't have to watch skinny, pretty girls get dates because they hung their chests out to dry and had perfect legs and short skirts.

Nowhere is perfect, of course. I still have to watch people who get in trouble because dating just kind of sucks, and I have to smell gasoline and fryer grease, both of which are not pleasant smells, and I have to watch skinny, pretty girls get dates because they have the social skills of Southern debutantes and I have the social skills of a constipated baby giraffe.

But the nice thing about it is that I don't feel any pressure to be with anybody, if I don't want to. Right now, thanks to my plan for school, I have never felt more free of stress. I am not dating boys and I am not worrying about whether I'm going to look pretty. I am focusing on learning how to speak Russian and I am learning how to weigh my scoops when I serve people ice cream. I am learning what I love doing, which is reading books and writing stories and poems and blog posts and watching characters made by other people come to life through books and movies and television and that someday I want to create lives in that way. I am learning that some days it's okay to leave for class ten minutes before it starts instead of twenty minutes before it starts, if you need that extra few minutes to breathe before you leave. I am learning how to spend money wisely and how to enjoy the mindless tedium of a job that has a set routine, because as I work I can daydream about better jobs and things I like doing. I am learning that if you are constant with your facial cleanser and toner routines, your acne will mostly clear up pretty fast. I am learning that packing your lunch is cheaper than trying to pick it out of a vending machine. I am learning that when I look in the mirror, even on a day where I wear paint-stained jeans and a wrinkly T-shirt and pull all my hair back into my severe nun-bun, I can smile and say, "Sarah, you look tolerably nice today, because you are a tolerably nice-looking person." I am learning to follow my dreams. I am learning to pick myself up when I fall down. I am learning that as much as I love my mother and as much as she loves me, some decisions I must learn to make by myself. I am learning that although I am deeply, deeply flawed, I am also talented and special and unique, and that there is nobody exactly like me in the whole world- and that's a good thing.

I used to dream about being in college, when I was in high school. I imagined the freedom of being able to take archery classes and biology labs where a cute guy would volunteer to be my lab partner, and I imagined going on dates every Friday night because it was BYU, after all, and who doesn't go on dates every Friday night? Well, as it turns out, me, because I find dating extremely stressful. And I never took an archery class, although I did learn how to shoot a bow and arrow over Thanksgiving break at Superwholockmarauder's. And when I took biology, it was in a lecture hall, and we didn't have to dissect anything because the teacher was eight months pregnant with her fourth child and she taught us about climates by showing clips from the Lord of the Rings movies. And I wrote a ten-page paper on Greek mythology in James Joyce's short story from his short story collection Dubliners, and I wrote a seven-page paper on how one of Keats's sonnets was like the story of Cinderella.

And these things, I discovered, were infinitely more fascinating than dating boys or archery classes. I was making these connections between ideas in books before I ever went to college, and then when I took my English classes it just clicked. It was perfect. It was what I had been doing my entire life without realizing I was doing it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, that BYU is perfect for me because of who I am. My religion is a major part of my identity, of course, but it's also all about the friends I have made here, the people I know who love Doctor Who but who will also go to church with me on Sundays. It's about the memories I have of walking to church by myself in the howling snow, an hour early, for ward council. It's about inventing new foods- chicken noodle soup with cheese, anyone? It's about sleeping in and staying up too late and doing your own laundry and walking a block to the Creamery to buy three gallons of milk for five dollars.

If you had told me five years ago, in the middle of my freshman year in high school, that five years later I would be saying how much better everything is now than it was then, I would definitely have believed you, because my freshman year of high school was me trying to fit in somewhere, anywhere that would take me, and trying not to fall madly in love with my best friend, and playing most of the piano songs for the whole high school choir and doing it better than the senior accompanist. It was stressful, and fun and angsty because I was a teenager and just leaving behind the realms of puberty, a terrifying place, for the realms of post-pubescence, which was an even more terrifying place, because it's puberty that you're used to, an expected kind of pain.

Peter Pan never wanted to grow up. Ha. Growing up is great, except for the responsibilities and the puberty. Those parts suck. Everything else is way better, because you get to learn and learn and learn. And you know how when you're young, you think your parents know everything?

And then you grow up and you find out that nobody ever knows everything, and then you just get to keep learning and learning, new things every day of your life, and sometimes you forget bits here and there but every time you open your eyes on a new day, you have learned something the day before, and you are, in that moment, learning. You are knowledge itself, because the truth of your very existence is a knowledge greater than anything that's come before or since: it's the knowledge that you are one in a million, maybe insignificant compared to the great names but of great, infinite worth to God and to those who truly love you. It is a feeling of both complete loneliness and of a deeper connection with every human who ever existed. It is knowing that you have brothers and sisters everywhere, that you will always be alone, that you will never be alone, that being alone isn't wrong, that not being alone isn't wrong, that existing, breathing, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling- all of it is the most wonderful thing you can ever do.

With love, a dreamer of the everlasting dream.