A year ago, almost to the day, I decided to start a Substack. It was a crisp, sunny Monday in early fall—September 11th. Eesh! I didn’t realize this would be the anniversary of my publication every year hence. Good thing the Gregorian calendar doesn’t really work and 9/11 falls on a Wednesday this year, happily missing the Monday posting. (Okay, I had to get that out of the way. It’s been preoccupying me for a while.)
This time last year I was just beginning the college admissions process. Now, I’m just beginning college.
“I only have one year of homeschooling left,” I wrote in my first-ever Substack. “One year to be splendidly, desirably lonely.” (I was reading Lawrence Durrell’s Balthazar at the time and that’s how the narrator describes his time on a deserted Greek island.) “Who knows what’s going to happen next year, when I go to college? The things I know are good about my life are all going to change. The things I’m unsatisfied with will probably stay the same.”
It sounded sad when I wrote it, but also it was a relief to see that sentence—a sneaking suspicion, deep and abiding and stomach-churning—on the page. And I’m so glad to read it again. I’ve never been so right! I miss my family; I miss my somewhat unstructured days. I feel like I’ve aged twenty years (and not in a getting mature way, more a “she looks tired” kind of way), and I’m not sure that I’m learning as much as I was this time last year. But I do have new good things in my life now, and I think I’ll always be a tad unsatisfied.
Last September I wrote that “maybe writing about what I’m doing will help me stay in the moment, and multiply in richness and depth what precious time I do have. So this Substack aims to be an avenue for thinking clearly, honestly, and productively about homeschooling.” Every Monday for the past year I’ve used Substack to work through what I’m thinking about that week. Usually it’s a book. Sometimes it’s writing about my teachers or the people I most admire. Sometimes it’s art I’m working on. Sometimes it’s trying to understand the unnerving inner-workings of my own mind.
Thinking clearly, honestly, and productively about college is hard. It’s all coming at you at once—the annoying, the chilling, the beautiful. This year on Substack, we’ll puzzle through it.
A year goes by fast, but slower when you’re writing about it every week. Thanks to the difficulty of writing, this year has felt incomprehensibly long. And by Zeus am I grateful for it.
