The roots

In early September, 1994, my parents, sister and I hitched a small U-haul to my mother’s land yacht Lincoln Town Car and left southwest Louisiana. We drove and drove and drove, north to Evanston, IL, a beautiful town on Lake Michigan’s sparkling shores. I’d been accepted off the waitlist to Northwestern, my first-choice school.

We checked into the Omni Orrington, and I chose my moving-in outfit with great care. When we left Louisiana, it hadn’t occurred to me to be nervous. But as the reality of “leaving for college” set in, my palms grew sweaty and my stomach began to burn.

I matched my hair bow with my shirt and put on my cutest jean shorts and a belt. It was a fly outfit. Back home.

As we walked up to the fourth floor of Bobb-McCulloch for the first time, each carrying a box or bag, my mouth dried as if suddenly stuffed with cotton. A boy wearing just a towel slung around his hips and taut stomach walked out of the bathroom. My parents’ eyes widened as he turned into the room next to the one I was to call home for the coming year.

Because they were excited for me, they faked bravery and enthusiasm so well I didn’t know their stomachs hurt too. Dad went out and found cinder blocks to raise my bed. Mom strung cute twinkle lights around my window. Elia arranged my pictures. We met my roommate, Rosemary.

I got out my backpack, the black Janson with Emily monogrammed on the front pocket, a heart in place of the dot over the i, flowers and curlicues circling my name. This was an extremely hip backpack. Back home.

I had worked my ass off for four years to get to Northwestern. Had slogged my way through chemistry and calculus and physics, made a 4.0 year after year, got the glowing recommendations that I needed.

But I didn’t realize how rooted I was in the safety of my supportive family, and when the U-haul was empty and we stood on the steps of my dorm for that final hug, I crumbled, like a tree that had rotted from the inside out, looking mighty and lovely until a wind showed otherwise.

I heaved and sobbed and told them that if they loved me, they’d take me home with them. I couldn’t do this. Who was I? Their eyes welled with tears (and my poor sister looked terrified; I was falling apart, and she had to go home alone with emotional parents and be an only child for three years!) and they said firmly, “You must stay for at least a quarter. You worked so hard for this. We love you.”

I hid in my dorm room for four days until Rosemary said, in her Florida twang, “Emmy, you really just need to get out there.” I’m sure she said it as much for own sake (warranted!) as mine, but it worked, and I remain grateful.

As she put on her makeup, her “mask” as she called it, she told me about a party that night in the frat quad and about what she was doing during breaks in orientation. She showed me how she was putting down roots, starting small with little taps.

Later that year, that glorious, perfect, bad-grade year, I found that my new sorority sisters had kept the Emilys straight by referring to me as the monogrammed-backpack one. It still cracks me up to think about those conversations. They thought it was adorable, not weird as I’d worried, but I still got a new one for sophomore year.

That year I realized that uprooting can be painful and terrifying but also the most liberating opportunity. When you have, or feel you have, nothing, what can you do but grasp so as to avoid falling?

I “got out there” again and again and again, rooting myself in the shores of Lake Michigan, and the beer-soaked carpets of Fiji and Delt, the snowy sidewalks of campus and the twenty-four hour dance marathon that I completed after pulling my ACL while “skiing” moguls in Wisconsin the week before. I went and played hockey the night before a psych midterm, danced drunkenly to Ill Communication at a party, had the best first kiss of my life with the boy down the hall, had my heart broken, could.not.believe. the frigid windshear and cold of an Illinois winter.

In all of those moments of searching and rooting, of realizing how woefully ill-prepared I was for the rigor of such a fine school, I started becoming myself. A self that had always felt so elusive before.