Tag: writing

looking back on 2021

The Thrill of Hope

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Somehow, someway another year has passed. And broadly I would say it was not really a good one. It started with a literal coup in the so-called greatest country in the world and is ending with another wave of the pandemic that has already killed a large swath of our population. Yet here I am, silly ol’ Kamaron, clinging to that Christmasy sensation known as the “thrill of hope.”

Once again, this year has reminded me of how incredibly lucky I am. It just occurred to me that I did not actually write a year in review last December, but opted for a sappy Instagram post commemorating what luckily wasn’t a bad year for me personally. “Despite missed parties and canceled plans, I was able to grow and thrive mentally, professionally, physically, and spiritually. In light of traumatic periods and unforeseen circumstances, I found beautiful memories and invaluable lessons.” Most of that sentiment rings true at the end of this year.

Not only did I get promoted with a salary raise at one job, but I then started a completely new job earlier this fall. With fewer canceled events and gatherings, I had the pleasure to reunite with some friends I’d not seen for the bulk of the pandemic and enjoy some of the pre-pandemic luxuries like traveling and going to concerts and the movies. I moved into my first solo apartment in a neighborhood that makes me feel welcome and appreciated. Finally, I continued many of the healthy habits I picked up at the beginning of the pandemic like running and meditating to keep my zen.

Of course, all of those good things and the others not mentioned can’t make up for what we as a country or even as a species have lost these last two years. The collective grief is untenable. That’s deserving of its own reflection at a later date. But I’m not being that hyperbolic when I say I feel like a chunk of my brain is missing. The mish-mash of memory that has become the period from late 2019 through the last few months has had a noticeable effect on my psyche. I have long prided myself in having a stellar memory, able to recall the exact feeling and thoughts I had on the first day of preschool as well as my class schedule from my freshman year of high school. It’s not perfect and certainly not photographic, but for as long as I can remember (ha) prior to the pandemic I was able to recall events from each passing year quite strongly. Now I can’t always tell the difference between things that happened six months ago to things that happened two years ago. I know I’m not alone in this, plenty of folks have commented on the weirdness and/or nonexistence of time these days. I hardly recognize videos and photos of myself from those early pandemic days. It’s been 12 years or six weeks I couldn’t tell ya.

Ironically, this is maybe the second or third blog post I’ve written on this website this year. My ~professional~ writing career kind of took off with that first promotion and now I have the pleasure of telling people I’m a full time writer. I really like my new job and the brand I write for now, but the fact of work remains a drag. Just in that “I wish I could retire and lie on the beach all day” kind of way. But all of that to say I have a complicated relationship with my passion for writing these days. It exhausts me and infuriates me at times but it remains the constant in my life. This year has brought my work to places I could not have predicted from covering the average length of new car loans to dream retirement preparedness and parental support for adult children. I wrote about the average age of people starting businesses and racial disparities in student loan borrowing and more before rounding out the year with expert advice for financial New Year’s resolutions.

Needless to say, I’ve kept busy this year. 

This year I decided to become that girl. Taking advantage of my beautiful living situation in the greatest city in the world, I took some pretty big steps out of my comfort zone in an effort to fully immerse myself in this place and really put down some roots. Meeting new friends and neighbors has been perhaps what you would expect in New York. As mentioned, that welcome feeling in my new neighborhood has not been without its edge. For every “Good morning” and door held open by a stranger there’s been an “I wish you were walking me on that leash” or an “Is the master as friendly as the dog?” greeting me as I make my way around the block. Harlem—and maybe all of the city—has a very special way of making you feel like you’re never alone. In the most menacing and most comforting ways. But for the most part, I have felt increasingly like a member of a community here and look forward to deepening that connection and the ones I have made with new friends.

I had the great privilege of traveling to a new country this year when I set out to Costa Rica on my second major solo trip. The whole “Pura Vida” thing felt cliche prior to visiting just thanks to those bracelets that were popular for a minute, but then I got to Jaco and I felt it. I don’t consider myself very outdoorsy, but I don’t think I could ever be as happy indoors as I am in a perfect landscape. And I took it all in through a surfing lesson in the Pacific and an ATV tour through the jungle. While I would probably recommend visiting not during the rainy season, I can say with full confidence you’ll have a beautiful time if you visit Costa Rica.

Later in the summer my best friend and I took a little road trip up to Acadia National Park in Maine, which brought another host of “firsts.” I’d never been to Maine, nor a National Park before and while Costa Rica brought me up my first notable summit, in Acadia I climbed my first ever mountain on foot. 

My mantra throughout the last year or more has been simply “I can’t complain.” Because truly, I can’t. I do not take lightly the luck I feel for having gone through (what has hopefully been, by now, the bulk) of the pandemic unscathed. I have my struggles and my bad days, but the weight of the mass death that has taken place around us the last two years has only deepened my appreciation for life itself. If I have one major side effect from these pandemic years, it’s that I show a lot more emotion now. It’s a little embarrassing and maybe off-brand, but I find myself quite frequently crying tears of joy just at the little things I get to do because one I am here and two I am blessed. I got to see The Nutcracker ballet before Christmas and wept. I ran under the banners from the New York City marathon and got choked up thinking about how those people get to be alive and accomplish one of their dreams. Don’t even get me started on families reuniting after travel bans got lifted. It’s tew much.

I’ll try not to go overboard on sappy because there is still so much to mourn, and unfortunately more to come. But I think the thing that has helped me stay a little positive, feel a little less exhausted with it all is that thrill that comes from hoping something better is coming. Do I always believe it? Not at all. Most days I turn off the part of my brain that says “Oh my god things are going to get so much worse,” and turn on the part of my brain that says “Life is short, eat the ice cream.” And some days, I book a vacation and say if we’re going out, I’m going out thriving. 

What Have We Learned

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2018 has quite literally felt like one of the longest years of my life. I’ve probably said that in some form every year for the last 3 years at least, but this one was particularly chaotic and thus felt like an eternity. But what have we learned? It’s been such a transitional year for me that it feels like I’ve lived three separate lives this year. And through it all, I’ve picked up a number of life lessons I thought I’d share.

I started the year as a senior in college interning at a fashion magazine. I was more broke than I had ever been in my life, but enjoying my final semester of college. Then I spent the summer interning at The Daily Beast, which was kind of like big-girl-job purgatory. Not because it was a bad experience, but because I had entered into adulthood in terms of working a 9-5 job and being out of school, but it wasn’t permanent, and I still went in every day with what felt like a sign on my back that said “intern.” And not because I was treated as such there, more just because I knew the whole time it was temporary and I spent a lot of time applying to other jobs and worried about what would happen when the internship was over. And now here I am finishing out the year as a full-time employee at LendingTree, enjoying the full benefits of paid time off, health insurance (granted, I’ve yet to actually utilize either of these literal benefits), and a level of job security I did not know before.

One taught me love, one taught me patience, and one taught me pain…I type that in jest, but that lyric really could be used to describe the different roles I went through this year. My glitzy fashion internship was more or less a bust. I threw so much money at the MTA just trying to make it a worthwhile experience, and at the end of the day, it wasn’t. I don’t regret doing it—I did learn what it’s like to work at a fashion magazine (yawn), and that some celebrities who will not be named give excruciatingly boring interviews. I can’t say for certain that the gig at ELLE allowed me to pursue my next endeavor, but I have to acknowledge that it didn’t detract me from my trajectory. I went into my next stint at The Daily Beast with the feeling that I had a minuscule amount of journalism experience.

My time at The Daily Beast did a few things for me. It made me love the news a little bit more and hate the news a little bit more. Part of that was just the timing, I mean I don’t know if there’s a news cycle that anyone really wants, but the one I worked with this summer was absolutely not it. It tapped into levels of empathy I didn’t know I had while exposing me to a vast list of things I do not understand. It challenged me to learn more while drawing on my education. In terms of hard job skills, I picked up a couple at The Beast, but I learned a lot more about myself that I’ll get into in a moment.

And here I am now just over a month into my new job at LendingTree. I won’t say more than I can about what the experience has been, but it has been positive. The corporate world is insane and I’m not sure I love that aspect of it, but my office is homely and my team has been incredibly welcoming. I have the satisfaction of knowing I’m where I’m meant to be right now.

So what have we learned?

Probably the biggest lesson I’ve taken out of this year is knowing when to be selfish, and doing it. I spent way too much time this year in my professional and personal life waiting for someone else to make a decision for me, or tell me what I want, when I absolutely could have and should have taken the reins. I always thought I was a selfish person until it was important for my well-being that I be selfish. It was hard (because I’m obviously super selfless). But I had to take a good look in the mirror (and get yelled at by my mom) to say, “Kamaron, you should be doing better.” Which brings me to my next lesson.

Patience is not just a virtue, it is the virtue. Each of the jobs I had along with just being a person this year was a constant reminder to have patience. But with that, I also had to give myself a kick sometimes and say I’m not going to sit around waiting for this or that. I did and you do at some point need to say “Here’s what I can do to change this,” and then do it. There will always be factors you can’t change, but the ones you should change aren’t going to change themselves. Sorry to get preachy, but that was experience I really went through in my job search. Patience kept me a little bit sane when I sent out dozens of job applications that would get no response. Patience kept me from committing a crime when I would hear back from a job 5 months later letting me know I’d been rejected. But I also changed my resume or my search approach probably ten times throughout my process. I refused to give up half because I literally couldn’t, and half because I knew something good would come out of it.

One lesson The Daily Beast did reinforce for me was to have the confidence to speak up. I consider myself an outgoing person, but I am deathly shy especially when I know I’m in no position of authority. My defaults to thinking no one wants to hear my ideas because I’m just the intern or I’m just the assistant, or I’m just Kamaron…and I do regret the amount of time I spent at The Daily Beast not sharing my thoughts. It really just took my supervisor saying, “You should speak up more,” for me to be like “Oh they want my input.” Realistically I should have had the confidence all along to know they hired me for a reason and that I was a voice they wanted at the table, but it took a push for me to actually speak up. By the end of my time, my supervisor was applauding my ideas because some of them were actually good.

The final major lesson I’m taking away from 2018 is the greatest of all that I have now just ruined by tying it to a played-out cliché. Yeah it’s love. Wow, did Kamaron grow a heart in 2018? Kind of! I didn’t need to learn how to love, but I did start paying extra close attention to the way I show my love. Through all of the ups and downs of the year, I clung so tightly to the people in my life who make it all worth it. I went through a period in the year where I felt like I was being a really bad friend because I knew I didn’t show love the way my friends did for me. In some ways, I literally couldn’t—like when some of my friends show me love by paying for me to come out with them when I can’t afford to. But there were plenty of other ways other friends would show me love that I didn’t reciprocate for no reason.

I had friends on campus who without fail whenever I saw them, would offer to be there for me if I needed help with anything. Friends who consistently complimented my outfits or pictures online and in person. Little things that would make me smile or make my whole day, but I wasn’t doing for them—with no excuse. So I decided I needed to make an effort to show the people I love that I love them in whatever ways I could, just because I could. The real lesson here was realizing, these people weren’t doing these things for me because they had to, or for any ulterior motive. They just wanted to let me know that they love me and care about me, and I learned it is so special and important to let people know you love them in this way. Just in your every day interactions. It sounds kind of stupid now that I’ve written it down and I do feel like the Grinch character here who had to learn basic human affection, but progress is progress!

That was my 2018. I lived, I learned, I loved. Came, saw, and conquered. The what’s next question is big and open-ended for me right now, but that’s a good thing.

Happy Holidays, and a very Happy New Year

xoxo,

Kam

Semantics

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Words kind of run my life as a writer. So I think about them all the time—how they work together, how they change with context, how they define all these aspects of our lives—semantics, essentially. Words carry weight, that’s undeniable. But too often we get caught up in the semantics that we start to miss the point. We can’t see the forest for the trees—we think if we call something by another name, it changes the meaning entirely, and that cannot be true.

Politically, socially, and practically I’ve lately been paying more and more attention to the way we use and manipulate words to get what we want or to get a point across. We add weight to words to make issues seem larger than they are—often to a fault. We decorate sentences with flowery language to hide something in the tangles. We act one way and speak a different way because words are disputable when actions are not. Think about the word “literally.” In an epic scene from one of my favorite shows, The Newsroom, Jane Fonda brings to light the fact that the dictionary has added a definition to the word “literally” which states that the word can mean “figuratively.” She blames the fact that people continually misused the word “literally” so much that the dictionary made the definition cater to those who used the word correctly, so now when someone says “literally” we don’t necessarily know if they mean actually or figuratively. How wild is that?

I don’t think I have a point here. Semantics is the point. Words do have meaning, but maybe keep an eye on the actions that follow the words. Don’t miss the forest for all the trees.

That’s What Happened With Cat

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My lack of posts recently can be directly attributed to a major case of writer’s block. Therefore, I have decided to try something different and share an essay with you readers that I wrote for my nonfiction workshop this past semester. I hope you enjoy.

…

Pyewacket was a member of the family before I was even a thought. I grew up right behind her as if she was my third older sister. As she watched me grow from infancy through adolescence, I watched her grow from a spry young feline into a decrepit bag of bones.

When I was young, I wanted to align my opinions closest with my older brother Zack. As the only male child, he assumed dominance among the siblings, even over our oldest sister, so I imitated him the most. He didn’t like peas, so I didn’t like peas. He preferred vanilla, so I avoided chocolate. He always wanted a dog, so I affected a distaste toward our cat. As I grew older, while the rest of my opinions formed independently, I kept my apathy for Pyewacket.

Domestic house cats are typically expected to live up to 15 years. So when Pyewacket reached 17, then 18, we knew it couldn’t be much longer. First she started slowing down. Like any creature past its prime, Pyewacket slowly stopped doing normal cat things. She used scratching post less and less. She only went outside to cry to be let back in. She started sleeping all the time. Not that cats are usually playful and overly energetic, but there was a distinction between her youthful sleeping habits and those as she entered her final years.

Next came the howling. We understand that she may have gone deaf or, at least, hard of hearing so to compensate, her meows became howls. This would be fine for a normal healthy cat, but Pyewacket became a finicky old bitch. My bedroom was situated closest to Pyewacket’s food bowl, so I spent most of my high school years being woken up by these howls. If she was hungry, which was around her 6 am, she let me know. She would situate herself right outside my door and cry for an hour before I could motivate myself to get out of bed and feed her. MROW! MROW! MRRRROWWWW!!! became my alarm clock. I never wanted the job of caring for the cat, but she decided it would be my job for those years until the food itself wasn’t enough.

A curious thing about this aging cat was finding teeth throughout the house. I’d run my hand along the back of the couch where she habitually napped, and find a fang or two among the cushions. Soon it was hard to believe she had any teeth left, and apparently she had lost too many to continue to manage hard food. We noticed her food bowl went untouched for days before, I assume, she would endure gumming her food to avoid starvation. My mom ultimately decided to start buying wet food, and Pyewacket ate right up.

Then there was the peeing. In the beginning of her decline, Pyewacket started peeing on soft things. If a blanket or pillow were left on the floor, she would pee on it. She still used her litter box sometimes, but if you left any kind of fabric on the floor, you could expect it to smell like ammonia the next day. Whether she conditioned us to stop leaving things on the floor or she just stopped caring about where she was peeing, she eventually started peeing everywhere. The carpet, the linoleum, sometimes her litter box, but anywhere else was fair game. This was when my anger and hatred grew for her. She would look me square in the eye and pee on the carpet as if to say, “F*** your youth.” I eagerly awaited her death. Every time I found her sleeping especially static, I would check for a pulse only to be disappointed by the sudden up/down of her frail body taking a breath.

The summer before I left for college, I spent most of my time around the house. One day my sister, Kassidy, and I were home, doing nothing and expecting nothing. The landline rang and neither one of us answered. A woman’s voice echoed through the house leaving a voicemail, “Hello this is animal control. We found your kitty on the side of the road…” Kassidy and I met in the living room, realizing the situation. We glanced out the window and saw the animal control truck across the street. I bit my lip trying not to smile.

We approached the truck, and found the woman who had been trying to contact us.

“Hi, you were just leaving a message on our machine?” I asked.

“Hi! Yeah, your number was on her collar. I’m so sorry.” The woman opened the side of the truck.

“Ohhh no,” Kassidy feigned a sad face.

The woman brought a black garbage bag out of the truck and asked if there was some place we wanted it.

“Oh. We have to take it?” I asked, confused as to what would have happened if we hadn’t come outside.

“Yes..” The woman seemed appalled at my willingness to part with this animal.

“I guess you can leave her here on the porch, and we’ll wait for my mom to come home.” The woman gently laid the bagged cadaver on my front porch and left us with her condolences. I called my mom and delivered the bad news. I was shocked when she said she’d leave work on her lunch hour. The cat was still going to be dead when she got home at 4.

My mom pulled in the driveway with a wet face. I had hoped there wouldn’t be any crying. I showed her where the cat laid, baking in the sun. “What happened?” she cried.

“They’re not really sure. I guess she was on the grass across the street, and one of the neighbors called animal control. They didn’t think she got hit by a car. She didn’t look all bloody or anything.” We decided it would be best to put her in a better container until we could give her a proper burial later, so I brought out an empty litter container, in which she should not have fit, but she folded right in it. My mom returned to work.

That afternoon, my brother-in-law Alfredo came over to help us bury Pyewacket. She loved him the most, honestly. He dug a hole, and I brought out a paper bag to contain her more ecologically than the garbage bag. My mom scoffed at the inappropriateness of the Olive Garden bag in which we buried her, and I counter the fact that we could pay for an honorable pet funeral, and she quieted.

“Well, I don’t really believe that pets go to heaven,” my mom delivered a eulogy. “But if they do, I sure hope Alvin is rubbing your back with his foot [My father would do this all the time before he parted]. And I hope you weren’t in any pain. You were a good cat.” She wiped her face, and we took a moment of silence.

The whole situation was bittersweet on my end. I was not sad to see the cat go. I might even say I was glad to be done with her. I was however, disconcerted by the noises that continued throughout my house at night that I had previously attributed to Pyewacket. A thud here, a creak there. Now there was no comforting explanation as to what went bump in the night.

The Race Thing

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To answer the big question of “what am I?” I am mixed black and white. My father was black and my mother is white, and I am a beautiful caramel macchiato.

This has never really been a problem for me. When I was in first grade a girl asked me if I was adopted when she saw my mom, but that’s been pretty much the extent of my raced-based interactions. I struggle with my hair. People ask “What am I?” and sometimes men approach me with a reluctant, “Hola?” thinking I am Latina.

The quick answer and identity I used for college applications was and always has been black. Partially because I’ve always just kind of felt black, and partially because whatever I am, I am simply not white. However, I realized something this week. I am very white.

No, I wasn’t trying to prove my dance moves. I wasn’t complaining about the food being too spicy. I was actually in a classroom. My writing professor assigned a reading to us about “Black English,” and one teacher’s passion for teaching the cultural dialect as a written language. I could not have felt whiter.

The goal of the piece was to highlight the issues with “Standard English,” and to speak to the injustice done to the black community by not accepting their syntax as “proper.” This did not sit well with me. I was raised to not say “ain’t,” not use double negatives, and to enunciate each word carefully. I’ve spent years drilling the rules of English grammar into my skull, and here this professor seemed to be undoing all my hard work.

I don’t want to address the question of prejudice here. I want to speak more about my own experience and identity that was brought to light from this lesson.

I found myself hating this piece because I was angry that someone was saying my precious rules for grammar were systematically oppressive. Then I was confused because in feeling this anger, was I coming from a place of internalized racism? This begged a larger question, and one I have kind of held in the back of my head since coming to college: am I black enough? There are things I know and things I am not sure about. I know that I stand against racism. I am not sure I am a victim of it.

I know, especially compared to too many other people of color, I have never experienced outright personal racism. But have I internalized it based on the fact that I can’t get down with “Black English?” I know some people would tell me yes. I only hate Black English because the white man has told me to hate Black English. But I think I actually, as a writer, as a rule follower, enjoy conforming to the rules of standard English. Yes, these rules came from a bunch of white men, but so did the Constitution and I do love my freedom of Speech.

I don’t know where my endgame here is. I guess, if you are someone who wants to speak and write in “Black English” I can’t and won’t try to stop you, but I’m not going to use it myself. And I don’t think that makes me any less black. I think it means I was raised differently or come from a different culture. I will respect that it does not make you less educated or less refined, as the piece pointed out, students who tried to switch from Standard English to Black English had trouble conforming to its rules. And even if it was “easy” it would not be invalid.

I guess my point is, don’t make me choose. I cannot choose which race I want to be every day. I don’t think any part of me is strictly based in one-half of my chromosomes. I just don’t want to feel like I’m betraying either one of my races in saying this, so I’m not going to. I’m mixed, and that’s not important because at the end of the day I’m Kamaron no matter what.

xoxo,

Kam