What I Know For Sure

Note: I've been wading through the various blogs I've kept throughout the years and selecting my favorite posts -- I want to compile them here on my website. This entry, posted on July 18, 2015, is from the blog I kept during my year in Malaysia.

I watched a lot of Oprah as a child.

In fact, I probably watched an unhealthy amount of Oprah as a child– but I balanced it out with tons of reading and writing and playing outside. I learned a lot from Her Majesty Oprah’s show, including how to reconcile with my adult children after overcoming a heroin addiction and that 80% of women are wearing ill-fitting bras. Who knew?! Oprah, apparently. I even picked up a few tips on minimizing the appearance of wrinkles and fine lines after 40.

Silliness aside, there is one element of Oprah’s show that has stuck with me for all these years. It’s never too far from my mind as I ruminate (as I often do) on my life and how various elements of it are unfolding. Oprah always asked her guests one question: “What do you know for sure?” I found the answers fascinating because, as a child and teenager, I couldn’t really pinpoint anything that I knew with certainty to be true. I knew that I loved chocolate and hated sauerkraut with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. I knew that my sick but COMPLETELY REASONABLE obsession with John Travolta had defined a good portion of my life. I knew that toilet humor would never stop being funny– for the record, I’m 23 now and it’s still hilarious.

But when I really thought hard about it, there was nothing truly meaningful or personal that I knew for sure. I had guesses, yes. I had dealt with struggles here and there and I was not a complete stranger to sadness or personal growth. But nothing was concrete. Nothing was real. Nothing was for sure.

The last six or seven years of my life have been a roller-coaster combination of accomplishments and agony. I’ve battled low points lower than I ever could have imagined as a child. Depression has gripped me and left me with bruises that will never quite heal. I’ve cursed my own existence and thought about escape.

But I’ve also done things that, as a kid, I never would have believed possible for myself: I worked for David Letterman and appeared on his show. I spent four months teaching theatre and improv comedy to male prisoners. I carried out a photography workshop for secondary school students in Africa. I traveled all over the world. I fell in love. I mentioned John Travolta in a speech at my high school graduation and wasn’t booed offstage. I saw some of my heroes in the flesh. I went to incredible concerts and took a 700-mile road trip all by myself. I moved away from home and graduated from an amazing university with a degree in something I’m passionate about. I killed a man with my bare hands. Okay, the last one was a lie (as far as you know). But the point is that my life has been full, for better and for worse, since the first time I heard Oprah ask somebody what they know for sure.

And now I’m here in Malaysia– learning, working, eating rice on a daily basis, and growing in ways that are simultaneously frightening and empowering. The last month has been painful. I feel angry. I feel betrayed. I feel sad. I feel invisible and small. I feel forgotten and unimportant and weak. Did I mention that I feel angry? I don’t know what’s going to happen next in my life or if any of these circumstances will change for me. But with all of this uncertainty and suffering, I have made a realization that feels full-circle. I can’t predict the future or rest assured in any certain outcome: but now, finally, there are a few things I know for sure. Just like one of those cool, self-assured famous ladies on Oprah, like Diane Sawyer or Toni Morrison.

So, what do I know for sure?

I know that I am brave. I know that I have a family and core circle of friends who think I’m pretty awesome, even when I’m not so sure myself. I know that animals and non-puking babies will always comfort me. I know that I feel most miserable when I lose a sense of control, in big ways or in small ways. I know that people are people– that my Malaysian friends and my American friends are made of the same stuff in different packages. I know that Donald Trump is one of the biggest idiots of our time, despite the fact that I religiously watched the first three seasons of The Apprentice and enjoyed it very much. I know that no love will compare to the love I feel for my mama. I know that my incessant impatience has never brought anything good into my life. I know that, outside of my family, the people who shaped and affected me the most growing up were my teachers– the good ones and the bad ones. I know that it is possible for me, as an atheist, to pray in my own strange way.

I know that pain, despite its own crippling insistence that it happens completely in vain, eventually becomes useful. It becomes useful when a shy student opens up to me about a broken heart and asks me how to make it hurt less, even for a while. It becomes useful when I can write these words out of my heart and share them with others. It becomes useful when I am hit with a whole new wave of it and I remember the way I breathed through it before. Perhaps it will be useful in my future as a television writer, when I might create a character whose pain must be convincing. It is useful because it reminds me that I’m still here.

And so here I am, three months away from my flight home to the United States. I will keep posting sweet photos of me with my beautiful students and friends. I will fill you in on the funny moments and the difficult moments and the weird moments, which happen on a pretty regular basis. In early November, I’ll get back to Michigan and be reunited with so many incredible people and places that have comforted me often during the lower points of my time here. I don’t know what will happen after that. I don’t know if the aches and thoughts that plague me right now will be relevant or significant or even existent. But I do know that I will be forever grateful for my year here and the immeasurable ways in which it has shaped me– even if it has sometimes served merely as a setting or catalyst for realizations that might have happened anyway.

I’ll go home and I’ll see what happens. And, if I somehow find myself more lost and uninspired than I was before I left, I’ll just turn on the TV. They’re always playing Oprah reruns in the middle of the night.

Until next time,

Soph