If my soul were going to college, wouldn’t it want to know which schools before selecting classes and a major? Would it want to attend the same liberal arts postage stamp I attended or would it prefer a livelier Midwestern football legacy powerhouse? I think my soul would still find itself transferring back to that little postage stamp in Rhode Island with its niche majors, perpetual games of hacky-sack that I lack the coordination for, and a cafeteria staff the same age as my mother and would genuinely want to know how me and my friends were doing and how classes had been treating us. No matter how independently minded young men and women can be it is still good to confide in Mom or Grammy sometimes. Like our mothers we would come in from the ripping Mount Hope Bay winds for grilled cheese, chicken fillets, and coffee. Afterward we’d trudge back to debating public policy and Fitzgerald’s dialectical movements. Perhaps my soul would be more mature and wary this time. My soul would ask tougher questions before deciding to stay up all night and write and talk with other nocturnal friends.
My soul would also be less shy when it came to men. Thankfully the heavenly ticket taker/conductor that is fate finally assigned us to our own private car. However, during my first two years I would pass him on my way into the Mac classroom where I always sat in the back and wrote when there wasn’t a class in there. Brian and his crew were sitting in the front always talking about their cars and motorcycles and his – at the time – girlfriend. I thought that by writing I would free my soul. It wasn’t until years later at Kripalu that I finally did. My soul got suppressed by mean criticisms from jealous creative writing professors, my own low image of my writing, and just being afraid of living with all of life’s trials, errors and consequences always surrounding me. I was 19 and tired of having to make hard choices and having to feel like I was going at it alone again. While my mother and later those surrogates in the cafeteria would listen and seem genuinely interested I couldn’t validate myself and, therefore, my soul.
With all of that background, my soul would study validation. It would arrive in class with all of the other souls with their baseball hats turned around, flannel shirts, and ripped jeans. Grunge was king in the 1990s and my soul and I still mourn for it. The professor would come in and define the word validation, use it correctly in a sentence, and explain the Latin root. For its first assignment my soul would write a paper on the importance of not being tough on itself and the virtues or respecting my own opinions and ideas. Opinions can be like onions, sometimes they’re so strong they can make you cry. My opinion of my soul was such that validation and taking the right parts of me seriously were out of the question. After the exercises in validation would come affirmations. This would be in a smaller classroom with all the other souls that are in the degree program. These are the souls that I and my soul will see for both the fall and spring semesters for the next four years. In the course on affirmations there would be rousing discussions on every form: daily, in a mirror, live, taped into a Dictaphone to be played later, written down on a tablet to be read later, borrowing a book of them from the school’s library.
By now it is lunch and the souls would need the mid-day coffee. College for both corporal beings and souls can still be wearing and require stimulants. There would also be the requisite visits from the surrogate Moms and their concern if we’re not sleeping right and so forth. After a stomach filled with caffeine, salad bar lettuce, and chicken salad off the souls would go to hear the long lecture on pride. Not pride in the sinful sense but that pride that is at the intersection of self care, a self preserving and healthy brand of narcissism and selfishness, and assertion. Late in the afternoon the souls would all sit on the steps of the library and trade notes and ideas. They would try and find ways to “surf” the term paper from affirmations for the thesis and final arguments for the major take home final for pride. After eight semesters, gallons of coffee, late night cramming, breaking and mending hearts, and finding someone else’s underwear in with your own clothes in the dorm laundry room would come the caps and gowns. Lots of hugs to fellow souls, promises to write and meet up after Memorial Day, and asking to send along your soul’s resume and portfolio that now proudly says “soul college graduate” at the very top. Queue up pomp and circumstance.
