I brought jungle-themed cupcakes to my first day of school. The cups I brought were giraffes; their spotted necks were the handles. We sat in the cafeteria and everyone sang “Happy Birthday” as I swung my legs. The chair was too big for me. I was four years old.

For the next eighteen years, I went to school:

I stapled my pinkie in kindergarten—the nurse and my teacher cried, but I didn’t. My first grade teacher’s name was pronounced “Tall-Bert,” which I remembered because Bert is taller than Ernie on Sesame Street. 9/11 happened when I was in second grade; my teacher ran into the music room to watch it on TV while my class shuffled around the hall, alone, curious, and afraid. In third grade, my best friend moved away. Fourth and fifth grade were hellholes of bullying.

I moved from a public school to a Catholic school in sixth grade, made new friends, survived seventh grade braces and eighth grade dances. I figured out I was queer right before I moved on to a Catholic high school. In my freshman year, a guy followed my best friend and me down the freshman hallway, calling us dykes. I turned around and tried to punch him in the face. Sophomore year was the advent of my Bieber hair and emo phase and also the site of the one crush-on-my-straight-best-friend experience all queer kids face. I wore cat ears with my uniform in junior year and still did all right on my SAT. Senior year was a blur of AP classes in the day and sneaking out at night.

Then I graduated in a tacky red-and-gold gown. I stood there in my hometown’s muggy May heat, hair limp beneath my graduation cap, and thought, "Now what?"

College was 'now what.'

From the time I was a snot-nosed second grader scribbling in a bedazzled ballet slipper notebook, I knew that I wanted to go to the University of Evansville and write. When I played pretend, I was J. K. Rowling: I formed drafts of stories in pencil, then went over my words in black ink. I dreamed of sitting in the low-hanging branches of the tree in the middle of UE’s front oval. I thought that I would lie there and daydream in the shade while the Administration Building’s bells rang.

I didn’t realize that my freshman Creative Writing class would coax our professor outside to sit in those branches for class on a mild February day. I didn’t know that I would build snowmen in the front oval on a day when I’d been snowed in to campus during my junior year. I didn’t think that I would fly to England for the first four months of my sophomore year—or if I did, I didn’t realize that I’d spend half of those months in my dorm, immobilized by depression, and the other half romping through Europe with new friends from all over the world.

I didn’t know that I would meet my own Avengers team at college. Or my bridesmaids. Or my wife.

And now—

I’m sitting in my kitchen, not registered for classes because there’s a degree on the shelf above me: BFA, Creative Writing, summa cum laude. One piece of paper attached to some cardboard that’s supposed to sum up all that I learned at UE. Yes, I learned a lot about writing. Dr. Nik, Dr. Bone, Professor McMullan, all of these professors who taught me so much about the importance of word choice and craft. Their lessons are all so important to me. But half of what they taught me wasn’t about writing. It was about how to make a joke, or how to communicate with another adult, or how to size up a toxic situation and realize ‘This person is not my friend.’

This is how to explore. This is how to meet your wife. This is how to climb a tree. This is how to sneak out. This is how to come out. This is how to make new friends. This is how to survive bullies. This is how to lose a friend. This is how to live in a terrifying world. This is how to staple a paper. This is how to read.

This is how to become the person you’ll be in eighteen years.