Ten Things That Make Me Happy

1. Springtime - Every year, starting in mid-March, I start keeping an eye out for the first budding leaves of the season. Here, in upstate New York, that never happens until late April or May. But I can't help myself. I stare at the same tree branches on my way to and from classes until the day that some green returns to Potsdam. The life returning to the world just fills me with rapture, and I want to spend all of my time outside enjoying the warmth.
2. Having long chats with my friends - Sometimes, that means sitting in the living room with my housemates as we sing showtunes and talk about crazy schemes to get a tiger (we're not allowed domesticated pets in our house, but our lease said nothing about undomesticated pets). Others, it means chatting on the phone with my long distance friends, or just long streams of text messages in a group chat. I love being close to my friends.
3. Traveling with friends - I spent many years growing up traveling around with my family. I've been very lucky to see all that I have. Still, the first time that I traveled with a friend of mine to Berlin for a weekend, I quickly realized that traveling in small groups with friends gives me the freedom to choose what it is I want to do and create my own itinerary. So as much as I love visiting places with my entire family, I'm excited to travel more with my friends as adulthood stretches on.
4. Plants - I want to be a plant mother! Unfortunately, my rooms in both houses - my apartment at school and my parents' house - lack sufficient amounts of sunlight to raise plants. Someday, I'll have a whole family!
5. Harmonizing showtunes with my housemates - Singing showtunes alone just isn't the same as our duet lists with specific roles. I usually end up singing guys' parts because I'm not a soprano. But that's okay! It helps me learn to harmonize, something I need to get better at.
6. When the time on the clock matches - I use the 24-hour clock, so times like 11:11 or 00:00 (midnight) only happen once a day!
7. Funky socks - After getting twelve pairs of Harry Potter related socks for Christmas, I'm now determined to collect as many unique pairs of socks as possible.
8. Classic literature - Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy plenty of books from modern times, but I definitely also hold a great love of classics. There's a reason I almost studied English in college.
9. The sky - The sky changes even more often than I do, but there's always beauty to it. Somehow, I've seen the Golden Hour hundreds if not thousands of times, and yet it still makes me catch my breath every time I see the golden glow reflecting off the trees.
10. Playing music - I can really struggle with expressing myself emotionally through words. There are days that I can't find any way to describe how I'm feeling. But music is able to transcend that. Whether it's simple chords on a ukulele, a piece on piano, or an etude on saxophone, I love days when playing is easy and I can connect with what I'm playing. 

My Musical Journey

I'm currently in my second semester of music school, looking at another three after this. But I didn't know straight out of high school that this was where my life would be heading. Though I'm in my first year of my major, this is my third year of college. 

So what have I been doing for the past couple of years?

It's a question I've asked myself repeatedly before, regretful that I didn't start my major straight out of high school. Certainly, it would make the process a lot less complicated. But it's easy to look back and recognize all the mistakes you made without considering how you felt when you were going through it. Senior year of high school involved a lot of big life decisions, and I'm a super indecisive person. Plus, each bend in the road has been important in my journey to get here.

It all goes back to my senior year of high school. I was enjoying the time I had left with my friends, but a large part of me was itching to get out into the world. My high school years were rather isolated for someone living in a foreign country. Most of my time was spent inside my house. The idea of having the freedom of a college student seemed exhilarating. 

Looking at colleges, I realized that I was split. I wasn't sure on what I wanted to pursue - English had always been a love of mine, but areas in medicine starting to interest me, too. The one thing I knew I wasn't going to look into too deeply was music. Everybody expected me to follow some sort of musical career, and I've always had a complex about listening to other people. The thing is, I knew that, if I ended up going to school for music, I wanted to know that it was my decision, and not the pressuring of my peers. 

So I continued looking into schools. In the end, I applied to four, all in the Northeast - Susquehanna University, University of Vermont, Ithaca College, and embarrassingly enough I don't remember the fourth. It was three years ago, okay? Either way, I got accepted into all four. 

My decision to attend Ithaca College for Physical Therapy is still a little confusing to me, even now. I think the idea of a stable career with a good paycheck - plus having the title of 'Doctor' - appealed to me. I've always felt like there have been high expectations for me, if not from other people than from myself. I never want to do less than I'm capable of. And, especially in high school, I had very high ideas of what I was capable of. 

What might've happened had I chosen Susquehanna, the school I'd had an interest in since freshman year of high school? Would I have decided that English was a good fit for me? Would I be nearing a year out from graduation? 

I can't say for sure. I do my best not to romanticize what might've happened - choosing a different school by no means I'd suddenly be living a perfect life - but it's hard not be curious. 

Whatever might have happened, I chose Ithaca College. I think it was to the dismay of my parents. Most of my friends in school weren't close enough with me to realize that it was in complete contrast to any interest I had shown in any sort of career. They just saw that I was intelligent, likely intelligent enough to handle a more competitive field like physical therapy. 

Shortly after graduating, my older brother and I said good-bye to Germany and moved in my with my grandmother for the summer. I didn't want to experience cultural shock at moving back to the U.S. alongside the shock of starting college, so we all decided it would be better to off-set the two. 

That summer, I didn't feel the freedom of a college kid. I mostly stayed in my grandmother's house, feeling strange about the world outside. The U.S. has fewer sidewalks than Germany did. It made it hard for me to get places, considering I didn't have a driver's license.

My freshman year at Ithaca could be a story in and of itself, but I don't have time to get into all of that right now. So I'll sum up the important bit: I felt myself going crazy in a major that I quickly found myself dissatisfied with, around people I couldn't relate to, all in the shadow of Ithaca's huge music program. While others were taking steps to build on their skills, the most music I was able to participate in was a weekly session for Campus Band. Going from being involved in music everyday during high school to suddenly only having it once a week felt horrible. And having to do that while music majors lived and studied around me was even worse. I wanted more than anything to be a part of that.

But it was important that I leave Ithaca. So I started looking at other schools. The problem is, I didn't start searching for them until well into my spring semester, when it was already past the audition dates of many of the schools I was looking at. 

I hadn't applied to any of those schools even by the time summer had rolled around. My parents had moved to Kansas, so I spent my summer there, making pros and cons lists and narrowing down the plethora of schools I had at my disposal. Eventually, it came down to three: UMKC, SUNY Fredonia, and SUNY Potsdam. 

That fall, mom and I packed up the van, and we drove up to the North Country heading for Potsdam. 

Originally, the plan was for me to audition for the Crane School of Music during the fall, so that I could try to fill a spot for the spring semester. It took me about a week to recognize that I was not going to be ready by the audition later in the semester. So I filled out as many Gen Ed credits as I could in my schedule and waited until 3 February to audition for the fall semester. 

My audition could've gone better. I played through the third movement of the Heiden Sonata, fairly standard repertoire (not that I had a clue about standard repertoire at the time). But my professor told me that he could see I had drive, so he put me through a test for the rest of the semester. I took lessons with one of his students every week, to see how well I could keep up with Crane's pace. In May, when I went back, he assured me that I had made it. 

Now, I've never had any interest in staying in undergrad for two extra years to make up for time lost. Instead, I found it better to get my degree in a B.A. in Music, something that is only supposed to take an extra semester from my original four years. With that, I hope to move on to grad school, likely with a Music Therapy Master's equivalency program. 

It's been a crazy road. But now I'm here. Living in an apartment that may or may not be infested with mice with some of my best friends. So far north it won't really warm up until finals week. Middle of nowhere. There are times it drives me crazy, but I'm lucky to be here. It's taken two years of work to get this far. I'm proud of myself. 

I did it!

The Beginning

Once upon a time, there was a girl. She had spent her childhood years traveling around the world, living on different continents and exploring new cultures, only to find herself heading off to college in a remote rural town so far north in the state of New York that it was basically Canada. She enjoyed her life there, spending her days in classes and her weekends getting into shenanigans with her friends. They were a good group of people, the kind that never made her hide behind a mask and always had her back. But there were parts of the girl that they couldn't understand. And there were nights where she would sit alone in her room, reading through old journals and aching to escape the somewhat mundane life she had found for herself in this isolated place. Because she was not made to last in such an environment. She could not handle feeling trapped. So she turned to her writing, to her memories of all the places she'd been before, to regain some of the feeling of freedom she'd had growing up.
She was The Girl Out of Everywhere.