I Snuck In and Out of Ohio and it was the Best Thing I Could've Done for Myself

I have a strange belief in universal signs. I’m not always certain where I sit on religiousness, but just in a spiritual sense, I believe the universe has a way of speaking to us.

Recently, I have felt that the universe has been speaking to me about graduate school.

I’m currently working on my MFA in Creative Nonfiction. I’ve been through a few semesters, and it feels like each semester has been met with some level of pushback from the universe. I don’t care to go into specifics, but by the end of this last semester, I was feeling a little beat. I loved the program, but it seemed like I was receiving all sorts of signs telling me that it wasn’t right.

And then the universe spoke to me again.

There was a poetry reading event happening in Highland Square in Akron, Ohio, and a few people from my undergraduate class—who were in their own MFA programs—were going to be there. It seemed to me that I needed to go back to Akron.

Now, admittedly, when I was finishing up at Akron way back in 2016, I was not in the best place. I needed to not be in Akron. And I visited once, a year or so after graduating, and it was not a good visit. No reason in particular—I enjoyed seeing all my friends again—it just wasn’t great. It was too soon for a visit, I think. So going back up to Ohio was definitely going to be a risk.

Which is why I went “incognito.”

I didn’t tell a lot of people I was going; I told my dad, a few friends, and only a few people from Akron. I didn’t put it on social media. I booked an Air BnB, and was off.

The first day I was there, I went shopping at some Ohio-themed stores for Ohio-specific clothing that we wouldn’t find in Maryland, I bought Shearer’s Potato Chips for my dad (a beloved brand that, again, isn’t found in Maryland), and I visited my grandma’s headstone. I hung out with two of the only people I told about my visit with, and then went back to the AirBnB. The next day was the festival in Highland Square, which included a poetry reading by some of my old classmates, and others whom I didn’t know. My original thought was staying until the end so I could talk with people, but oddly, by about the middle of it, I was ready to leave. Not because I didn’t want to talk to anyone—I just felt that I’d gotten everything I needed for the trip.

What I realized, as I did everything by myself and then landed at the AirBnB to decompress by myself for those few days, was that the only thing I need to pay attention to during my time in MFA and beyond is one thing: me. I want to do this program. I applied, I got in, and I enjoy writing. The universe can do whatever it wants, but at the end of the day, I am where I am because I want to be here.

Do I think it was necessary for the universe to send me 6 hours away to figure this out? Probably not. But I started to feel like I was drowning in Maryland, and Akron provided a nice reprieve from that. I drove home feeling pretty rejuvenated, and ready to tackle the rest of the program, regardless of how difficult it might get.

Because I want to do it. And sometimes, it’s okay to only think about me.

Peace, friends.