Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

Have you ever slept in a house that was so quiet you could hear a clock ticking in another room? WHY? If I wanted a soundtrack for my existential dread, I’d download a bunch of Ben Folds songs on iTunes like a normal person.

College was just the thing you did at the beginning of the montage, and at the end of the montage you’re Toni Morrison.

At the Hard Rock, I also got a great education on a bunch of bands I was too pious to listen to back in the day. Have you heard of Van Halen? Very good work, very interesting.

The idea was intriguing to me but only in the way that television is intriguing to a cat. I was pretty sure I didn’t give a shit about it, but because it was so foreign and yet so close to me, it piqued my interest.

When the fact of your being is used as a weapon against you, the process of relearning who you are and what your value is, is a long one.

I would try to find a way to tell people the “secret” of my storytelling, which, as I understood it, was just to tell the truth because you had no other choice. I would remind people in my classes that the storyteller gets to choose the beginning and the end, often despite what happens in life. And that you have to tell your listener what you, the protagonist, want. This connects directly to the “why” of it all. The impetus for raising your voice to speak. There’s a power and a clarity in saying, “This is where it begins for me, and this is where it ends,” and knowing why. The why is the most crucial. It’s what elevates an anecdote to a story; it’s the thing that makes people lean forward with anticipation, their pulses quickening, accepting the invitation of empathy.

But a friend had convinced me that I needed to be bolder if I was going to make something of myself. “If you wanna be somebody,” my friend told me, “if you wanna go somewhere, you better wake up and pay attention!” (My friend is Sister Mary Clarence from Sister Act II.)

Life will take your breath away. Life will— Oh! Chocolate éclairs! Grab me one of those.

You’re exactly who you need to be. Each of you. It may not feel like it; it may seem like it would be much easier being anyone else. You may look back at the person you were at one point and wish that you could instead be the person you are now at that far distant, unreachable point in the past. But you had to be who you were to get to who you are. Every page in the story is successive; they’re all numbered and bound like a book.

First of all, I think we all ought to acknowledge Beyoncé. Don’t you?