The Road Less Traveled

“I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference…..”

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the chaos and struggle of a journey that we forget where it all started in the first place. Two weeks ago I received a beautiful reminder.

It was my soon to be sister-in-law’s 21^st birthday and Andy and I paid her a surprise visit while she was studying in the library at Carroll College. I don’t honestly think I’ve stepped foot inside that building since graduating. We wandered the two floors, weaving in and out of bookshelves and study cubes, trying to find her.  We walked by a shelf containing all of the bound theses that seniors from over the years have slaved away at to finish. My eyes scrolled over the book spines desperately searching for my own name. Finally, on the shelf with the other 2009 theses, I saw my last name and thesis title etched into the blue binding. I pulled it off the shelf and then stood there for a moment just staring down at the book in my hands.

As I was finishing up my junior year of college in the spring of 2008, I was asked if I was considering doing a thesis. I learned that I could only graduate with honors if I completed a thesis. Having maintained a 4.0 GPA my entire college career up until then, it seemed like a terrible waste if I didn’t graduate with honors. But what would I write about?

At first I proposed writing an analytical piece about female authors from Montana and how the region influenced their writing…..or something like that. I figured I would sort out the real details later. I jotted a brief description down on the application, had my advisor sign off on it and submitted it. I was officially writing a thesis! I didn’t spend a single minute afterwards thinking about that fact though or my undeveloped topic. 

Then one summer afternoon, just before I was to begin my senior year, everything I had planned changed. 

I was struggling to repair a broken friendship with someone at the time and was emotionally distraught over what to do. I found myself driving up to the tower on the top of MacDonald Pass—I needed to clear my head. I got out of the car, sat down on some crumbling concrete steps with a notebook in hand, and begin writing. I don’t know how long I saw there writing, but when my pen finally paused, I glanced up and felt an answer click inside me.   I knew what I was going to do for my thesis.

As soon as school began at the end of August, I immediately approached my advisor and told him I wanted to write a collection of poems for my thesis instead. I was told I would need to write a minimum of 20 poems for the project. A thesis without any boring research involved? Seemed like I’d found the easy way out……….I couldn’t have been more wrong.

For the next 8 months, I poured everything I had into writing those 20 poems. I didn’t have to spend hours hunched over library books or scrolling the internet for research sources. My sacrifices were much greater. I wrote 20 poems about people and events pulled directly from my own life. And let’s just say, I didn’t pick the happiest of moments or the most loving of individuals to reflect on. I had a tattered and tear-stained notebook I filled with the often aimless thoughts of my mind and slowly crafted them into works of art. It was exhausting. It was heart-wrenching. It required me breaking and giving up pieces of my soul in order to do it. And the worst part was, I workshopped many of my poems during writing classes in school. Whenever students or my teachers said something critical, I knew deep down that they were just discussing the words on the page. But to me, it always felt like a personal attack on my life because the poems were taken right from my life. 

Just before Christmas, I found myself paging through a booklet I’d made of the poems I’d written thus far. It was to be Christmas gift for someone who appeared in several of the poems. As I was reading back over them, I was overwhelmed for the first time in my life with a feeling I thought I’d never ever find. It was passion. I had finally discovered my passion and knew that being a writer was what I was meant to spend my life doing. That moment alone made all of the work thus far and the months of work I had yet to do before graduation all worth it.

A few weeks shy of graduation, I walked into the library and handed a lady my thesis, in its entirety. I knew I should have felt relieved and exhilarated like all of the other honors candidates. But what I felt like was that the real work was only just beginning. My thesis wasn’t an accomplishment to me—it was the inaugural step of a journey. It was something I simply felt compelled to do. And everything about me and my life since has been different ever since. 

Seeing my thesis in the library that night reminded me of how much effort it took for me to come to the realization that I am a writer. And seeing my words bound up in a hard back cover, inspired me to keep doing what I’m doing until I can walk into any book store in the world and pick up a copy of my own book. Choosing the path of a writer with any amount of seriousness absolutely means taking the road less traveled. But I have been walking that path long enough now to know with certainty, that it will truly make the difference in the end.  

The graduation poem I unknowingly wrote to myself