Keke’s Big British Adventure 2k23
This is going to be a long one, I think. I’m catfishing a bit with the title, I’m not going to start with the British part. I’m gonna start at last fall and talk a little about this past academic year.
I hated damn near everything that happened to me this year. Now, don’t go tagging my university into this on Twitter (X???), I’ve already handled it. We’ll get to that. Let’s do some exposition first. Over the summer of 2022 I was asked what Teaching Assistant assignment I’d like for the fall semester, and I expressed a preference for teaching astronomy lab. I was told I could potentially have a lab section, but what we really needed were graders. Being a team player (sometimes), I said sure. I’d graded the non-major’s lecture course before, I could do it again. Little did I know, this time would be nothing like the last one. The professor teaching the course this time taught an overly-rigorous version of the course, and I’m not saying that just because I had to do the grading. His version of this course was unnecessarily serious. Why we needed people who haven’t taken math since high school doing full-on problem sets in addition to multiple choice AND short answers, I will never understand. It’s not that deep! Moreover, with COVID and everything continuing to run in the background, we had a severe shortage of grad student labor. This meant that I’d be the only grad grader on a course that was meant for two. I’m going to give massive credit to the undergrad grader they assigned to help me, as I absolutely would have crumbled without them. But an undergrad who isn’t actually an astronomy major does not an astrophysics grad student make. I was still grading all the short answers, running semi-weekly office hours, and I was the only one with access to the gradebook so I was handling all the grade entry. Undergrads also can’t grade exams, so I was the one coordinating the lab TAs to figure out when we could get together for grading (though I was promised help organizing these sessions and we were also promised food that never came until we demanded it). All of this was a bit unwieldy, but it didn’t help that the professor was too keen to offload any and all extra work onto me. When students emailed with schedule conflicts needing special office hours because they couldn’t make the scheduled ones, he’d say things like “let’s see if KeShawn is free! If not, I’m happy to help you.” I’m not a fool. I knew the respectful protocol would be to gain my consent to yield time that I’m not actually required to set aside. The question shouldn’t be “is KeShawn free?” but “is KeShawn free and willing to give up time he doesn’t actually owe me?” It also shouldn’t be me giving up that time every single instance. But I knew what it was gonna be when I looked at the syllabus and saw my email address pasted loud and clear at the top, and his nowhere to be found. I knew immediately what kinda semester I was going to have.
Things continued this way for the entire fall semester. Fielding emails from students who couldn’t find the professor’s email (because he didn’t want it to be found). Having the lion’s share of students come to my office hours instead of the professor’s because mine were in person, at his request, while his were virtual because he was soooooooo busy. Painstakingly going over homework sets in office hours because these students haven’t taken math in a hot minute, as I said, and the gap between the notes they take in lecture and the synthesis of that information when confronted with problem sets is a wide one. Being the sole person responsible for entering and keeping up with 180 students’ grades. I brought up the issue to the Director of Graduate Studies for astrophysics, with a list of specific fixes, to no avail. My shit semester finished with a fittingly shit bouquet final:
I planned to set aside a couple days to catch up on the last of the semester’s homework grading before the final exam, which would be an entire mess of its own, grading-wise. Imagine my surprise when a student emails me, saying that the professor told them (unbeknownst to me) that they could reach out to me to schedule appointments to review for the exam. As I said earlier, the students needed serious help going from lecture notes to an applicable sense of the material, and I was the only person who could reliably provide it. So of course I decided to forego the time I had set aside for grading and instead help students with their exam studying. This meant that I went into exam grading already behind. However, as long as the undergrad grader could take care of the problem sets, I could make the time to grade all the short answers as well as schedule the exam grading session with the lab TAs. However, the thing about an undergrad grader is that they’re an undergrad. I know from my own undergrad years that the end of the semester is an unbelievably busy time, so I specifically asked if they thought they’d be able to handle the grading burden atop their own work. They assured me they’d be fine. You know exactly where this is going. Let me be abundantly clear, I remember being 19 and biting off more than I could chew, so I don’t fault them at all for what happened next. But now I’m 27, and as the older person in the scenario it’s always my job to pick up the pieces. So when they asked me to take some of the grading off of their hands I took it in stride and added some of their grading to my own pile. Between my grading, their grading, and wrapping up the exam grading, I was working right up until the last second. My advisor asked about meeting, and I snapped back (a bit too harshly if I’m being honest) that I’m essentially carrying an entire course on my back and I’m cancelling all meetings until the new year. My advisor immediately understood and agreed we could catch up at the American Astronomical Society winter meeting to be held in January in Seattle.
The entire time I’d been suffering through the fall semester, I could rely on the impending solace of my end-of-course reviews. I was putting in work helping the students, and I knew their comments would reflect that. So when I received an email from a student who frequented my office hours saying that he couldn’t find the TA section in the end-of-course evaluation, I had to laugh to keep from committing at least one crime. I immediately sent an email to the professor who taught the course, who then sent it up the chain to the department’s office staff. No one could provide an answer as to why I wasn’t set up to receive evaluations, and at this point I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted to go home for Christmas and be done with it all. I had worked my ass off picking up the slack of someone way senior to me and had nothing officially to show for it. At least I was going to Seattle for a conference! That should be fun, right?
That wasn’t a total fake out, the conference was actually ridiculously fun, but it just wouldn’t be my life if something non-ideal didn’t happen. While at home in Dallas for Christmas, I got a call from the property manager of my apartment building. He let me know that due to a freeze, my pipes had burst and they were working on my bedroom and bathroom. Fortunately they managed to move everything from my bedroom to the other side of the apartment (everything including a few things I was embarrassed they had to touch), but it was still a fantastically dreadful icing atop the deliciously dreadful cake that had been my semester. There was nothing I could do from so many miles away, so I endeavored to enjoy my winter break. I went to Seattle, did my little conference duties, partied with the fishes at Pike Place, had some bangin’ congee in Chinatown, tasted geoduck for the first time, and found myself waiting for a flight back to Nashville with no clue where I was going to be living when I got back. Every time I spoke to the property manager it seemed he was working on finding a place for me to move into temporarily. I called him once more to say I was literally going to be home in a matter of hours and I needed to know where exactly home was. Finally, he broke the news that they couldn’t find anything in the area where I live and I’d have to shell out for a hotel and wait to be compensated. Once again, I had to laugh at the way my life is set up. Since there were a decent number of people from my university at the conference and there were only so many flights from Seattle to Nashville on the last day of said conference, it wasn’t too surprising that I was on the flight back with a couple familiar faces. One of those faces belonged to a professor in my department (not the one I had just TA’d for, God doesn’t hate me THAT much) who asked if he could sit next to me while we wait to board. Once we started chatting, I naturally spilled the information regarding the burst pipe that was occupying a disproportionate amount of space in my mind. He made the excellent suggestion that I ask my advisor to use some of our emergency funding to cover the cost of a hotel. We were soon to board the plane, so I quickly messaged her to explain the situation and she happily made the reservation for that night. I had no idea what was going to happen after that night, but at least I had a place to lay my head.
Now, I’m going to paint a picture. I need you to understand the cinematic value of this. After returning to Nashville and checking into my hotel for the night, I got as much sleep as I could, then woke up and enjoyed the continental breakfast. I hadn’t yet figured out my next move, housing-wise, but checkout time approached and I had to go somewhere. I checked out of that hotel, and decided to spend the day in my shared office in the physics building while I figured out where to go from there. As I set off toward campus, I realized it was snowing. I checked my phone as I walked and saw the formal announcement that an organization I’m a part of, Black In Astro, had just won the Annie Maunder medal for outreach from the Royal Astronomical Society. Snowflakes fell on me as I trudged toward my office. Temporarily unhoused. An award winner. I couldn’t even celebrate properly as I didn’t know where I was sleeping that night. But somewhere, way in the back of my mind, I was somewhat excited at the prospect of maybe traveling to the United Kingdom to attend the awards ceremony. I didn’t yet know if that option was on the table (though judging from the title of this post I think you can figure it out), and I didn’t really have the wherewithal to consider it, but it was an exciting whisper of a thought. In my office I figured out my next move, an extended stay hotel not far from campus, and struck a deal with my property manager that if I could front the cost of the hotel for the weekend they could take it from there. After showing up at the hotel front desk once the weekend was up and essentially telling the company that manages my apartment building “I’m going to put you on the phone with the front desk, you just give them the credit card info,” they finally held up their end of the deal. I ended up out of the house for a total of 3 weeks. I moved back into my apartment, I had already told (not asked) the physics and astronomy department that I’d be teaching lab for the spring semester after the fall semester I had (they agreed), and everything seemed like it was going to potentially be alright.
Lol.
At the end of March I received far too large of a paycheck. I know how eagerly universities hunt you down if they have reason to believe they paid you decently by accident, so I immediately asked payroll what to do with this money. They asked me to write a check for a sum that I didn’t quite understand. Upon asking for clarification, this is what I was told (as briefly as I can manage, my apologies for the dull technicalities): previously I was being paid as a TA since I was working as a TA, and what that means tax-wise is that the vast majority of my paycheck was a service-free stipend with only a fraction being considered a taxable wage. So small a fraction, in fact, that it actually wasn’t taxed after all. Therefore, I was responsible for my own withholding (which had never formally been communicated to me or any other student, by the way). So the first bombshell was that it was all but certain that some students were fully doing their taxes wrong because they knew no better and no one told them otherwise. In addition, the grant funding I was now on included in its terms payment as a Research Assistant (RA) (despite the fact that I was still working as a TA and had been the entire semester thus far), which meant my entire paycheck would be a taxable wage and therefore the withholding would be taken out for me. The sum they accidentally paid me was comprised of three months of RA pay (January, February, and March). I had, of course, already been paid TA pay (no withholding, remember? There will be a test!) for January and February. So the sum they wanted me to return was RA pay for January and February, since I had already been paid for these months, plus the withholding from these months, effectively replacing my TA pay for January and February pay with RA pay retroactively. It was this last bit that gave me pause. I was working as a TA regardless of what my advisor’s grant said. For me to be paid as an RA would mean part of my TA labor was going unpaid. Even if that withholding ultimately belonged to Uncle Sam, it was mine to give to Uncle Sam myself, not to my university. It was the principle of the thing more than it was the literal $357.
I was frankly running out of steam at this point, so despite my reservations I wrote and mailed a check for the full $5583 as I was asked. When the money hadn’t come out of my account after a week, I shot over an email to payroll to verify that they had at least gotten the check. They had me mail it quite literally 5 blocks over from my apartment, they should have had it already. I was informed that they hadn’t yet received the check, prompting me to preemptively stop payment on it as I was nervous. It’s a good thing that I did, because shortly after that I received an email from payroll with pictures of the envelope I sent them, ripped open with the check missing. All this brouhaha to correct an error that wasn’t my doing in the slightest. In fact, ironically in the end payroll misunderstood the terms of the grant anyway, as it turned out my advisor specifically and intentionally had me listed as an RA who should be receiving TA (read: untaxed) pay. All this brouhaha to correct an error that was fully contrived and never needed to happen.
My advisor and the Director of Graduate Studies for astrophysics (also my research co-advisor) had nominated me for a College of Arts and Sciences TA award in addition to me being eligible for the Physics and Astronomy Department TA award. The College-wide award is usually won by TAs in fields with more involved curriculum crafting and pedagogy, so I wasn’t shocked not to win that one, but I was one of two winners of the Department award. I would’ve burned everything down if I hadn’t been. It occurred to me that if I stood up there and wordlessly accepted the award, the entire department would think everything was fine. They’d just throw a certificate and a thousand bucks at me and call it even. What’s more, the ceremony was to be held in the Black Cultural Center. There was no way I was going to pass up the opportunity to speak whilst I commanded the attention of the entire white ass department in a space literally built for me and not them. I couldn’t live with myself if I did. I told my advisor I planned to deliver a short speech when I received my award. She told me that this was totally unprecedented and she wanted to run it by the department chair so he wouldn’t be caught off guard. The department chair, indeed shook, emailed me wanting to Zoom about it. He simply wanted to know what I was going to talk about. I gave him a quick rundown of everything I’ve told y’all so far, and told him I wanted to bring attention to the ways in which diversity, equity, and inclusion are performative so long as marginalized people are taken advantage of and our concerns ignored. He expressed support for my speech, which I did appreciate, but I also explicitly told him that what I had to say was so crucial that I’d still say it even if I didn’t have his support. He nodded and said “okay” because what the fuck else could he really say.
The day came. I showed up to the awards ceremony with a copy of my speech in hand. The Directors of Graduate Studies for physics and astrophysics read the names of the two TA award winners, one from physics and one from astronomy respectively, and presented us with our certificates. The astrophysics DGS then announced with a smile that KeShawn wanted to say a few words. He knew they weren’t going to be kind words, but he smiled anyway, which I have to respect. I began by expressing how apparently actually speaking at one of these ceremonies was unprecedented, which garnered a few laughs, but the laughs died off quickly once I got into the meat and potatoes. I talked about wage theft, I talked about disrespect, I talked about oversights and negligence, I talked about the performance that is “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, I talked about putting not only my life but the lives of my entire family on pause to pursue my dreams when I could be making real money and helping substantially at home. I discussed being punished for dreaming big, and earning an entire undergraduate degree just to have the fruits of my labor continuously deferred because I aspired to something more. In about six minutes I outlined all the ways they were making an already exploitative and immoral system even worse by way of their lack of care. When I finished, everyone present applauded. I knew they would. Self-flagellation is the white academic’s preferred form of torture more often than not. I returned to my seat, hugged my advisor, and enjoyed the rest of the ceremony.
In a sense, the speech was my last act before I distanced myself from all things that didn’t serve me directly. I had finished my teaching requirements. I was soon to go through my qualifying exam; an 8 page research proposal and corresponding defense. Pretty soon I wouldn’t need to come to campus unless I felt compelled. I would owe my university nothing but a finished dissertation, and everything else I pursued would be in service of tending to my impending life post-PhD. This was one final act, one last goodbye, before seeing my face would suddenly require much more intentionality. The astro DGS sat down with me for a solid hour and talked through everything one last time. I received multiple apologies, all of which felt genuine. I received communication from payroll about bringing an end to the whole withholding and overpayment fiasco (sort of, the money is still in my account as they haven’t taken it yet, which I’ve told them, but that’s neither here nor there). I was ready to move on.
I did pass my qualifying exam with flying colors, in case you were curious. It was the least difficult thing I did all year, by a landslide.
With school out of the way for the time being, I could think a little more about life. Right around this time, a discourse broke out in the astronomy world. A publication came out with known serial abuser Geoff Marcy among the authors. In the subsequent weeks we saw all manner of “I didn’t know he’d be on the author list” and “what about early career researchers’ career prospects” and other clarifications and whatabouts. All of it was deeply uninteresting to me. The fact of the matter is, the mere necessity of us once again having this conversation was an immediate indicator of failure. This wasn’t an ambiguous case. It was open and shut. There is literally a BuzzFeed article about this man and his abuses. We were handed an ethical problem on Easy Mode, Tutorial Mode even, and we still fucked it up. There is no way that guy should have ended up on a paper, and there’s no discussion to be had. If removing his contributions from your paper complicates things, so be it. I’m sure his abuse complicated lots of things for his victims. If I hadn’t already known for six years that I had no academic aspirations, this whole debacle would have really sealed the deal. But the goals I did have would be greatly expedited by those three letters, P-h-D, and as such I was stuck in the cowardly and opportunistic world of the academic until I could collect them. And that’s exactly how I felt. Stuck. I was already doing the thing I’d rather do than anything else in life, occupationally speaking, but even so I wasn’t enjoying myself. What if happiness in the world as it is now just isn’t for me?
I went home to Dallas for a couple weeks for my brother’s high school graduation. The change of scenery was much needed. My other brother (also younger than me) was the father of a 6 month old son at that time, whom I got to play with for the first time since the holidays. This also got me thinking about milestones and my own happiness. My brother is 7 years younger than me, and already has a child. I was the one with the impressive curriculum vitae, the “your mother must be so proud” child, but I’d bet a lot of money my brother and his girlfriend and their son were many times happier than me. I had to wonder if I was cultivating a life of loneliness, and neglecting to spend as much time as I should watering the garden of human interaction, be it platonic or familial or romantic or something beyond definition entirely. I didn’t aspire to marriage. I didn’t aspire to children. I didn’t really care if I ever fell in “love” in the traditional sense. But something was definitely missing, and I could no longer pretend that it wasn’t.
Upon my return to Nashville, a couple more of these incontestable pangs of loneliness hit me hard and fast. A dear friend and I double-featured The Little Mermaid and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. During the Kiss the Girl sequence of the former, I felt something I genuinely couldn’t believe: jealousy. Prince Eric was so enamored with Ariel that he spent time learning as much as he could about her even while she couldn’t speak. He found a language that worked for the both of them because he saw something in her soul, and knew that he needed it no matter what. I didn’t care about the “happily ever after” of it all. I merely believed myself deserving of something as transcendent as what I saw onscreen. I could recount instances of being appreciated physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Spiritually. But I struggled to recount instances of all four modes at once. Perhaps the most telling sign that something was definitely awry internally was the day I literally ran away from my coupled friends. Well, I walked, but the point remains. Six of us were in the park listening to a free concert, when the only one besides me who wasn’t with their significant other had to leave. (She did have a significant other, by the way, he just wasn’t in attendance. I just know one of y’all’s nosey asses is out there is asking, and I don’t blame you, the devil’s in the details!) Suddenly, there was me and then two couples getting cozy, leaning on each other and treating the live performance on stage as a serenade. The infuriating thing is that those four people would never judge me in a million years for being single. They were my friends, after all. The only person present expressing any negative sentiment toward me was myself, and there was nothing I could do about it. All at once I felt the pressure of living in a society built for coupled people as a single person who’s never dated, and I couldn’t help but feel as though I was doing something wrong. They all had something I’ve never had, and that my mother used to constantly ask me about until she stopped because she accepted that I’m a lost cause. The pressure began to make me physically uncomfortable, and before I could convince them to stop, the muscles in my feet pressed on the ground and I stood up to leave. “You heading out?” My friend asked. “Yeah, I gotta go home and…” I don’t even remember what lie I told. I started walking home in disbelief. This had never happened before. I’d never felt lonely to the extent that it interrupted an outing with loved ones. I needed to have a serious moment of reflection about what exactly I wanted out of the relationships I was forging. So I did the natural thing one does when they need time to think, and prepared to leave the country.
My advisor was happy to fund my trip to Cardiff to accept the outreach medal on behalf of Black in Astro, along with our social media director Cheyenne. I reached out to some Twitter friends, and before I knew it I had a whole 2.5 week London-Cardiff-London (again)-Oxford itinerary planned. And yes, we’ve arrived at the Big British Adventure, as promised. The first thing I did after my arrival at Heathrow was text the friend I’d be staying with to let him know I’d made my grand debut across the pond. After the delivery of a set of instructions and an extremely hands-on introduction to London public transportation, I finally arrived. By that time it was pretty late, and I only wanted to shower and hop into bed after an incredibly long day of travel. I lay awake attempting to internalize the fact that I was 4000 miles from home, across an entire ocean. I don’t think I succeeded the entire time I was there.
The day after my initial arrival, my friend and his husband were hosting a soirée in preparation for London Pride the following day. As guests began to arrive, it became a who’s-who of people I follow on Twitter. It was a thoroughly surreal and incredible feeling to be in a room full of people I had never actually met, but whose names and occupations I knew, at the very least. I felt that within 24 hours of being in London, I was experiencing the kind of queer community I had tried and failed to build in 4 years in Nashville. Granted, social media gave me a massive head start, but the point remains that sometimes the garden you’re planted in doesn’t have the best soil for you. It’s a big world out there, there’s no real reason to think the country you’re from is your best fit. Statistically, it’s kind of a silly assumption to make. The next morning, we took the tube (or chyoob as a local would say) to Green Park to picnic near the Pride parade route. Some new friends I met at the party the prior evening stopped by our picnic, and we struck up a conversation in the light of day. After the picnic, my London host went off to attend a speaking engagement. I suddenly felt a bit aimless, as the one person at the picnic I knew quite well was now gone. This feeling didn’t get a chance to last though, as my new friends decided to pay him a visit at his event, and happily brought me along for the journey. Before I knew it, I was walking around central London having things pointed out to me left and right. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that these were people I had met yesterday, but the joy they had in showing me a city that meant so much to them was genuine and palpable. Fun little aside: the speaking engagement my host shuffled off to involved even more of my Twitter mutuals as speakers, so this was truly the UK leg of the KeShawn+OOMFies world tour. On my last day of the first London segment of my trip, my host and his husband went to the movies to see the new Indiana Jones. Without hesitation, they asked if I had my own plans for the day or if I’d like to join them. That sort of thorough inclusion into their world for the time I was staying with them made all the difference. We didn’t just share the physical space that was their apartment, they let me into their life for a weekend. Every time my (Italian) host or his (non-Italian but married to an Italian so we’ll say honorary Italian) husband made (absolutely outstanding) pasta, three perfectly sized portions came from the kitchen. I’m so grateful I got to experience London this way, fully integrated into the lives of two people I hold near and dear, and who themselves hold London near and dear as well.
The friend who hosted me in London happens to also be an astronomer, so the two of us booked the same train to Cardiff for the astronomy conference where I was set to meet my teammate and accept our award. Upon exiting the Cardiff train station, my friend hugged me and ran off to his hotel, leaving me truly alone in a foreign country for the first time. Not only that, but this place felt…different. I’d been to NYC, Chicago, and LA, and London in so many ways felt like yet another huge urban center. Unfamiliar in a familiar way. But at that moment in Wales, I truly felt “abroad”. The Welsh on all the signs alongside the English, the accent I encountered at the hotel front desk which I literally could not parse without a three second delay, the ridiculously old world feel of the high street and the ancient castle, it all left me a bit overwhelmed. I tried my best to lean into the feeling, after all, that’s the reason we travel, and made my way to a place where I knew I could get my bearings: an academic astronomy conference. In general, once I’m within the walls of the building playing host to the hordes of astronomers in attendance, I know exactly what game I’m playing and how to play. After day one of the conference, I met up with my friend for dinner. To my utter delight, another Twitter mutual showed up to dinner, and yet another showed up to drinks at a gay bar afterwards. That surreal feeling came back, wherein I was met with a few familiar faces so many miles from home and it made the world feel impossibly small. After we all left the bar, I received a message on the infamous yellow app for gays from someone who was still there. They complimented my appearance and expressed how lovely it would be to meet me. I realized there was no way to combat those feelings of loneliness and undesirability that had plagued me back in Nashville if I didn’t answer the universe’s call, so I walked back to the bar solo and set my introversion aside. I was rewarded with a genuinely fascinating conversation, multiple warm smiles, honest kisses, and a very deep sleeper next to me when I awoke the following morning. Someone was genuinely enchanted by me on all levels, and I hadn’t been sure if that was really possible before then. I was honest with myself about what this was. This wasn’t my Prince Eric, and I wasn’t even in the market for that as I’ve said before. This was a new Instagram mutual I’d check in on six months from now and occasionally smile when I think about. But perhaps that’s exactly what I needed in that moment. A subtle affirmation that I, in fact, do deserve to transcend the cold and transactional interactions that I had let become my norm and feel warmth instead. People can be good, and people can inspire comfort.
One more reminder that people can be a gift came to me in the form of a new conference buddy. Back at the conference, I struck up a conversation with someone over lunch. We talked about our research interests, our cities and countries of origin (she was a South London girlie through and through), and pretty soon we were comparing conference schedules. For the rest of the week, every time I saw her I came over to chat, and we even went to a museum together. On our last day, I thanked her for being my friend in a place where I didn’t know very many people. I’m used to conferences back in the States where I’ve seen half the people there before. Despite how comfortable the conference rigmarole is for me, this was a whole new ballgame, and she made it easy.
Needless to say, the awards ceremony, which came halfway through the conference, was a dream. Meeting up with Black In Astro’s social media director, who I’d only ever seen on Zoom, and having succulent Welsh lamb and free flowing wine at every table? A room full of people applauding our work? Again, I went mentally to wherever it is I go when things don’t feel quite real. Here I was, some guy from Texas, and I’m having dinner at a rugby stadium in Wales by invite. I always knew my own potential so I can’t say I was surprised it was happening, but knowing something is coming doesn’t necessarily make it less jarring when it finally comes.
Cardiff had one last lesson for me to learn. The morning I was all set to check out of my hotel and take a train back to London, I was scouring that yellow app for gays for one last experience with a local as my special friend from earlier in the week had left for a vacation. Having fully talked myself out of a fear of rejection over the past couple years (the virtual kind, not the real life kind, I still very much have that fear) I shot my shot with a really pretty guy. If ever I find myself interested in someone conventionally attractive with the kind of body society likes, I’m prepared for a total lack of response as I know that desirability is power and power usually seeks equal or greater power. I think way too much not to be aware that this is someone society has trained me to find beautiful and I’m someone society has trained him (and me) not to. I’ve fortunately left behind the era of life where I take it personally as…well, we live in a society. But the microcosm isn’t always synonymous with the macrocosm, as evidenced by his rather prompt response to my message. Here’s where I admit: I didn’t think this far ahead. I was so primed for rejection and I’d already prepared my analysis of the scenario through a sociocultural lens, but he actually said yes and I wasn’t prepared for it. I did the first bit: understand that rejection shouldn’t hit any harder just because it comes from someone who aligns with society’s vision of beauty. But I failed to do the second bit: understand that acceptance also shouldn’t hit any harder just because it comes from someone who aligns with society’s vision of beauty. Bagging the pretty white boy with abs is not any more of an accomplishment than attention from anyone else who catches my eye. This wasn’t a new lesson, I’d been learning it since my teenage Tumblr era when I’d take note of which selfies and photoshoots received endless engagement and which fizzled out, and the skin tones of the people in the respective photos. But old habits die hard, so here I was feeling good about myself for all the wrong reasons. But after some more chatting we hit a lull, and enough time went by without a response that I had to move on. I ended up having a great conversation (that’s not a euphemism, we really did talk, among other things) with someone that I found very attractive, fully aware that they didn’t look plucked off the runway like the first guy, and that didn’t matter in the slightest. You win nothing by hooking up with people whose pictures you can show your friends and watch their jaws drop, except a few dropped jaws. It’s also self-denigrating to feel good for “punching above your weight” and holding your own. People aren’t prizes to be won, and in hindsight I feel disappointment with myself for being so shallow and uncritical. As I got ready to leave Cardiff, Mr. Runway Ready got back to me asking if he could come over later. I told him there was no later, I was going back to London, but he’s gorgeous and I’m sorry to have missed him. It was a nice thing to say but at the time it was also accurate. He double-tapped to like my response, wordlessly, and I understood that it’s never worth it to be with someone beautiful who doesn’t find you just as beautiful. I nodded my head as I realized some people want you because you’re you, and other people want you because you’re there. Pretty Boy was the latter, and the guy I actually linked up with was the former, and God was that lucky.
Upon my return to London, I stayed with yet another Twitter mutual, one that I’d followed for a long time. I’d actually seen him at the pre-Pride gathering the week prior, so the initial hello was already out of the way and we had five days to just enjoy each other’s company. I intentionally saved all my touristy London outings for this leg of my trip, and when I tell you my feet were sore as hell by the end! I killed time pounding the pavement in central London every day while my friend was at work, taking photos like the one at the top of this very article, and eating everything under the Sun (yes, this includes beans on toast). In the evenings, my friend and I had time to cook when he got off work, and cook we did. We planned a dinner party around the theme of fermented foods, shopped for ingredients together, invited over mutual friends (real life friends for him, longtime Twitter mutuals for me of course), and knocked it out of the park every step of the way. On my last night in London, I cooked my ideal Southern meal, namely the kind my Arkansan parents cooked for me growing up. Stewed okra and tomatoes, fried corn, and sweet rice. My host was sure to communicate to me how rare it is that he give up control of his kitchen to someone else, and I felt honored and humbled to be the exception. It was astounding how effortlessly our online friendship transferred to real life, and how much spending time together felt like being with someone I’ve known forever. There was absolutely none of that “new ice”, as I call it. The ice that introduces itself when you’ve already broken the ice virtually, but the corporeal form suddenly in front of you still requires some adjustment. Maybe I should translate that to French and then coin it. Nouvelle glace. You heard it here first. Anyway, from the back of my mind, there crept the reality that I’d have to leave this behind and return to strictly online friendship with the person sitting next to me once I flew back across the Atlantic. In fact, everything and everyone I had experienced for the past two weeks would be a distant memory once I returned to normal life. I had never been so gifted at holding multiple emotions at once as I was during this trip. Not everything I experienced in London that week was so profound though, some things were lighthearted and reminded me once again that people can be warm and sweet. As warm and sweet as the mint tea I had, along with digestives, at the Lambeth apartment of a man I didn’t know at all. Or as warm and sweet as the smile I cracked while flipping the pages of a book all about the history of Crystal Palace, handed to me by a Scotsman who wanted me to know the history of where we stood before we did anything else. As warm and sweet as the weather wasn’t on the day I set off for Oxford, the final stop on my journey. I had been looking forward to this leg of my trip for some time, because I’d be staying with one last Twitter mutual, one I’d become very close to over the four years that we had been talking. I had imagined what it may be like to meet him, as one does with their internet besties, but I realized I had no real idea what to actually expect. Obviously I knew exactly what he looked like, how tall, how he talked, all those things. But there’s no true preparation for adding a third dimension to someone you’re only used to seeing on your phone.
To this day, even as I write this, I’m floored by how mundane it felt to meet my friend for the first time. It literally felt like meeting any one of my Nashville friends for lunch. It seems silly to think I’d have been screaming and jumping up and down, but one can’t help imagining just that. It’s incredible that in the process of getting to know so much about this human, and teaching him so much about myself as well, we arrived at a level of comfort where a physical embrace was only gilding the lily. Seeing as though this was the tail end of my journey, it hit me how much I’d walked. How much I’d processed. How much I’d experienced. I could feel myself winding down a bit, becoming a slightly muted version of my typically incisive and somewhat brazen persona, and that allowed for the formation of a small block of nouvelle glace. I had one whole whirlwind day in Oxford to melt it, though.
Immediately upon meeting my friend’s partner I had to smile internally because he was exactly as ebullient as I knew he’d be. I understood instantly how and why he and my friend work as a unit, nothing could have possibly made more sense. After dinner for three and a night of much needed sleep, my whirlwind tour of Oxford began. My friend’s partner had gone to work for the day, but my friend took the day off to show me around. He said this as though it was no big deal, and sure enough I do come from the land of no days off and that doubtlessly colored my view, but this act was incredibly meaningful to me. Between my friend back in London lending me his kitchen in an unprecedented way and now this, I was starting to get the idea that people like having me around. I knew that of course, because that’s what friendship is, in theory. But for once I began to truly internalize the notion that people trusted me with their time and highly valued mine. I always imagined myself someone who kinda sucks at friendship and keeps people at arms’ length, so to see evidence that people I’d never even met before in real life felt close enough to me to practice these acts of love was a bit shocking and overwhelming. I was informed that my friend’s apartment there in Oxford is basically above a coffee shop and bakery, and thus my friend would be happy to bring up some breakfast. Within minutes I was staring at a pain au chocolat and a cappuccino, his treat. Once more, I didn’t quite know what to do with the love I was receiving. I was reminded of my 26th birthday, when my dad booked a hotel room for me and brought over enough Chinese takeout for the whole family to eat together. Obviously it wasn’t jarring to suggest that the people who raised me actually love me. But love, the emotion, the thing itself. It feels far too large to hold, to respond to, to take in, to express, in one moment. I’m so happy to have it, but I never know what to do with it. After breakfast, part of our gallivanting around Oxford included grocery shopping for a dinner party that evening, just like I had done back in London. This time it wasn’t a group I knew from Twitter, it was a group of people who were new to me, but were important to my friend and his partner, and as such they were people he wanted me to meet. Before I had arrived, my friend ran by me the plan for the day, and in the process realized there was a nonzero chance my introverted ass wouldn’t actually want to be at a dinner party with a bunch of white dudes I didn’t know who made more money than me. Ordinarily, admittedly, I wouldn’t. But I trust my friends to have good taste in friends, and no one would go to the effort of planning a dinner party on my single full day in Oxford if they didn’t want me to attend, deep down. That’s what I found so heartening: his desire for my attendance at the dinner party, in his mind, came second to my comfort, even though the entire purpose of assembling the troops this way was to have them meet me. There it was again, that expression of love I didn’t know how to hold. The previous night, the night I arrived in Oxford, something curious happened. I got a message on that yellow app for gays, and I recognized the sender. He asked me if I remembered hooking up one night in Nashville a year or so prior. I did remember, and it was more than a year. At that moment it was summer 2023, and he visited Nashville from Australia in winter 2021/2022. I remembered because it was freezing while I waited for him outside, but he had no international data so I had to be out there to let him know he’d arrived at the right place. And more importantly, I remembered because I enjoyed our time together and I thought about him from time to time, quietly hoping he’d visit town again. But it seemed it was I who visited his town, because he’s now attending school at Oxford, which was totally unbeknownst to me until that moment. He wanted to see me again, the same way I wanted to see him, but I wasn’t in town to reconnect with an old fling. I chose to board a train to Oxford to spend time with a dear friend, and I only had so much of it. I could almost laugh, it was such a cinematic instance. I had spent a year and a half silently wondering about this man and hoping there would be some slight chance to see him again, only to accidentally wander within a mile of him. And now I’m turning him down. Making someone a priority is just another flavor of that love that’s so hard to hold, and says what I can never manage to say in words.
After the dinner party, the entire gaggle of gays moved to the living room to watch pop music videos, as God intended. Slowly but surely, various pairings began to lean on one another, or play a little game of footsie. I began to feel the weight of solitude once more. I thought of the day I ran away from the concert in the park under this weight of solitude, but this was different because I had no desire to run. I suppose I could have retired to bed early or something, but I didn’t want to. I was enjoying myself with this group of friends and (boy)friends of friends. I again marvelled at how it felt to hold opposing emotions at the same time. To feel so untouched and undesired but so loved and full. To be lonely surrounded by friends. To be showered with love of one type and still want to taste a different flavor. To feel the superposition of a frown and a smile, and have them both be authentic and earnest. This whole trip had been so profoundly platonic. I mean yes, there were the hookups, and I told you about (most of) those, but the overarching theme had been friendship. White hot, searing, suffocating, blazing, overwhelming friendship. Being horrifically honest, I had done a lot of thinking before the trip about whether that would actually be the case. Queer people exhibit an incredible ability to undulate between the platonic and the more-than, and I crossed the ocean totally open to anything that could happen with anyone with whom I spent significant time. But the only thing that happened, beyond the brief moments shared with strangers and tinged with carnality, was pure unadulterated platonic adoration. And watching the others in the room lean into each other and into the community they’d built, it dawned on me that I would only ever be a guest in their world. I had a life and a world of my own back in Nashville, even if I wasn’t satisfied with it. This was theirs, and they worked for it, and it was a privilege just to be in the room. I felt imprisoned by, freed by, appreciative of, and contemptuous toward friendship. La nouvelle glace had melted just in time to say goodbye.
The guests left the party and suddenly there were three: me, my friend, and my friend’s partner. My friend went to bed, and his partner stayed up with me a little longer since my flight was early and I’d probably be gone before they awoke. I should’ve told my friend that as well, but somehow I didn’t feel as though we needed a big real-life goodbye, just as we hadn’t had a dramatic real-life hello. Eventually I too went to bed, and received an email early in the morning from the airline with which I was flying back to the US. They alerted me that bad weather had hit the eastern seaboard, and anyone flying into cities along the east coast could rebook for free. It was Saturday and my first flight was to New York. I rolled around in my mind the idea of extending my trip to Monday for no charge. The ice had just melted, and I was just getting comfortable, two more days could be transformative. But I remembered a doctor’s appointment that would be hell to reschedule. I only had so many clothes in my suitcase and I didn’t feel like doing a load of laundry. It had already been two and a half weeks and I was quickly fading. Whether I liked it or not, my real life was calling and I couldn’t keep running from it. I kept my original flight, and made my way back to Nashville via New York City.
Upon returning to Nashville, I experienced the typical post-travel melancholy. But this was personal, as I’d experienced such high highs only to be back in a place I don’t really like. If you’ve made it this far, I need to be honest with you about something. My 27th birthday was a week ago. I always write a reflection and publish it on my birthday. I’ve just tricked you into reading this year’s reflection under the guise of some sort of travelogue, though I did warn you at the start. But clearly, I’ve got some nice takeaways for you, after all, so much happened this year that I’m publishing this a week late. This past year, I learned yet again that I can withstand a whole hell of a lot, but I know I shouldn’t have to. I’m proud of the fact that when I reach my limit, I make it everyone’s problem. I also learned, thanks to a very nice stranger (now a friend) in Cardiff, that Ariel’s transcendent interactions with someone who sees her fully are not off limits to me. I learned that I’m not silly for wanting to experience all the types of affirmation that are possible from one person simultaneously, as it’s difficult not to feel broken when affirmation always come to you in fragments. One person appreciating your body, someone else your mind, and someone else your heart and soul. But simultaneously during my plight, I should lean harder into my friendships. I’ll undoubtedly find more people who connect with me on all possible levels at once, but love can look a lot of ways, and I do have plenty of it in my life even if it’s handed to me in pieces by different people. I was reminded again that you don’t get what you want just because you want it. What I picture in my head isn’t real and I’m not entitled to it just because I dreamt it up. The reality of the past year isn’t exactly what I wanted. But it is what happened, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it now. Well, nothing besides write a lengthy article born of omphaloskepsis, such as the one you’re reading now.