I Got Rejected From Yale Today

and I feel fine. Well, almost. I won't pretend that my lacrimal glands weren't activated today. I was shocked. Shocked and awed. Naomi Klein, you could probably have scared me into doing anything. But, surprisingly (yes, to me, especially to me), of all the things I'm questioning--the admissions committee's sanity, what I'm supposed to do with myself next, what God is thinking--myself isn't one of them. I'm proud of everything I put on that application. I'm proud of myself. I'm proud. (Not in a pompous way, however much this blog post may lead you to believe so.) I learned to have enough faith in myself to believe I could get in despite fighting mental paralysis to get my...stuff together. I fell in love with essays (and learned to love tough love). I wrote a personal statement that made my mother cry as she shopped for a refrigerator at Costco. And I'd like to think I was earnest, which, after all, is really the thing to be.

When I got home today, I went for a long run on the beach. I watched the sun sink, and as I beat the lasting light home, I figured that even if I have to sink, even if I have to relinquish my fantasy of a day to a humming twilight, star-peeks, moonrise, I can do it damn beautifully. Sunrises are golden paint, everything's better by the time the sun cookie-cuts quarters from your cheeks, but really, that's not the point. The fact that you know there will be a sunrise is not the point. The morning does not hold the glory. It's the way you fade, the way you relinquish yourself to the inevitable, that makes you.

As much as I'd like to believe the nay-sayers, the angry ones, those who can't believe they didn't get their second chance at Hogwarts and say screw the Ivies and legacies and private school quotas, I can't. Among the many nose-blowers tonight, I consider my (now) dry-eyed self the luckiest. I got to spend an enchanted year in what will always be, to me, the most magical place in the world. I found friends in New Haven, and at Yale, with whom I felt more comfortable than those I'd known since toddler-hood. And maybe, just maybe, that's enough.