I’m starting the MFA program at Columbia University in the fall. Literary Non Fiction. I have no qualms about going back to school, but once I started walking the hallways on a deserted Friday afternoon, the doubts began to echo as my 35 year old body passed by ear budded and beat covered ears, youngish faces with no signs of parental lines of worry. I went to the bathroom to collect my thoughts and found this:

It made me half smile. The rewording/defacing private property is something I would have done ten years ago. Something I would proudly do with my feminist friends, searching for our space in the world, restless to reclaim a corner of a university that has a harrowing record of its treatment toward women.

I feel secure in my age. Signs of age on my face have accompanied the deliverance of wisdom and understanding beyond my 20 something year old self could have imagined. And I am curious to see how this MFA program mixed bag of writers will mesh, in the classroom or the Women’s Womb.