Talking Towards Clarity: a vocab list for the summer

Here are the important words for the summer: the words I tried out to express what was going on as it happened, the words that allowed me to reach for something newly true.

Struggle
Endlessly useful since I stumbled on to it at Arvo's House this spring, with two basic uses: articulating internal struggle, and respectfully, positively discussing "negative" feelings about other people's choices and creative endeavors. I am trying the experiment of replacing "dislike" with "struggle with" as often as possible, though a good deal of the time I find the resulting statements very scary, and can't say that they're true. This seems to reveal what about myself and the world I'm unwilling to look at, unwilling to change.

Agency
generally used in discussion of adulthood. I started thinking about this at Buck's Rock, trying to describe the look of panic in the teenager's eyes as they left camp, and the immense sense of relief it brought on in me, to no longer be at their moment in life. A useful term for describing the exciting and terrifying possibilities of being an adult (see below). Also seems to be useful in articulating parts of the creative process. Still looking for a good definition of the term, though. I feel like I'm wielding it around experimentally.

Transcendent
Almost by definition, there's no way to pin down how I've been trying to use this word. It emerged first in the phrase transcendent friendship, something I came to while grappling for language to describe the experience of being with Zander and Jonah this summer. Entirely unique but not catagorically different: the intensity of my two months of sharing with them allowed me to articulate the catagory of relationships that become their own internal world, and that yeilds some something that feels huge. The idea of transcendence is not entirely secular, but somehow I'm sensing that the word itself is farmiliar enough that I can get away with using it in a secular context, or at least that it doesn't feel too far out of my realm of experience to use it to authentically describe my own experiences.

Adult
This is a messy one. At 23, I feel bashful about speaking of myself as an adult, but also it feels true. I might be a new adult, a young one, but what I and all my peers are really doing right now is definitely getting a handle on adulthood. Priorities, careers, ambitions, money, bodies, families, relationships: these are the things we stumble in to discussing and then look wide-eyed in fear at each other (not unlike the look of teenagers getting their agency taken away: the "oh shit, this is real" look) I am struggling a lot with the relationship between partnership and adulthood. I feel that the realities and challenges of being partnered with Kerry are helping me grow up: be a better listener, more open minded (okay, just slightly....), more patient, more giving. I know I am tapping in to this ability in how I deal with other people, but Kerry is really the site of this slow learning. I balk at myself, attempting to define the process of maturing through such a conventional standard. And I reassure myself: this is by no means the only way to adulthood, or the only path in my life that is growing me up. But real, committed acts of sharing between people- labels aside- is a positive avenue of growing. As I feel myself becoming both more willing and more able to enact sharing, I find myself thinking that I am becoming more adult.