650 Words

For her Capstone Project in Honors English 12, Rachel Bruno studied the work of Dr. Brene Brown, a researcher from the University of Houston who has written extensively about courage, shame, and vulnerability. Rachel ended up producing her own website that, like this blog, provided a forum for people to tell their stories. If you don’t know about Brene Brown, you might watch her Ted Talk , which distills some of her most popular ways of thinking. Having read some of her work and heard her talk on a number of podcasts, I’ve always been impressed. It is intriguing to me when I hear something that I immediately recognize to be true but have never thought of in the stated terms. This has happened a number of times in reading or listening to Brene Brown. It strikes me as true, for instance, that we spend an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to avoid shame in whatever form it might take. Without even thinking about it, we seek to minimize the possibility of shame by avoidin...

I have been accused of relating a few too many things to The Catcher in the Rye . Guilty as charged. I get a real bang out of Catcher . When I read Victoria Ralston’s blog post about coming to terms with her own mental health, I immediately thought of our friend Holden Caulfield. The two most enduring messages of that novel -- in my opinion -- are very straightforward: 1) Be honest with yourself about your own mental health; and 2) Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Holden walks around New York City doing everything he can to deny, repress, or otherwise not deal with the central fact of his life: he’s hurting. For Holden, the healing process doesn’t begin until he hits rock bottom and subsequently gives himself permission to get help. Victoria tells a similar story here. Like Holden, she takes a purposeful step toward mental health by acknowledging and naming a longtime condition (OCD) and then allowing herself to get the help she needed. Victoria graduated from high sch...

I suppose there are individuals who breeze through high school and college, buffeted by the winds of their supreme confidence and deep certainty about their developing identities. I just don’t know any of them. Kai Perket, who graduated from high school in 2016, describes their teenage years as a “really tumultuous time” in their life. Basic issues of acceptance are hard enough when you are in high school, but when you add questions about sexual identity into the mix, the confusion can build like a gathering storm. Kai writes about that storm of confusion here. Since graduating, they have moved on to Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, where they major in International Studies with a Political Science focus. They play softball and work with other athletic teams as a sports medicine assistant. Despite missing Mexican food and the California sunshine, they are getting the most out of their college experience. In their piece, Kai writes about their own personal journey towa...

The 650 Words blog has been in existence for about six months now. For the last few weeks, I have been thinking that I should write a post in which I tally up all of the great wisdom of our many contributors. If you are a fan of Brainpickings, it might be something like the 10 Learnings in 10 Years post from Maria Popova. I still might do that, but it occurred to me when I read Lauren Lillie’s post that she does something close here. Taking a clear-eyed look back at her high school experience, she offers her freshman self the kind of brutally honest advice that could only come after the general messiness of life experience. In doing so, she hits on some of the most common themes in the 650 retrospective universe: perfectionism, loneliness, and depression. She wishes she could have told her freshman self to chill out, take life as it comes, and enjoy the unpredictability of the journey. Adult Lauren has certainly done that. Since graduating from high school in 2002, she studi...

In this post, Kyra Ghosh, who graduated in 2013, writes about a topic that is at the core of this blog: the formation of identity. As I was reading about her time in Indonesia and the impact it had on her, it occurred to me how much the formation of identity comes up in my classes. No doubt this is partly the result of my own biases, because it is a subject that has always fascinated me. Just today, for instance, in my English 11 class we were talking about how Nick Carraway, from The Great Gatsby , learns something about who he is during his three months partying with Gatsby and Jordan and those awful Buchanans. He comes to embrace his midwest roots, his family values, his “provincial squeamishness.” At the same time, it is clear to the reader that he never could have reached these conclusions about himself if he hadn’t experienced the diminished values and general messiness of life in West Egg. Kyra didn’t spend three months living the fast life in New York, but she did s...

Section 52 of “Song of Myself” is most known for the reference to Whitman’s great “barbaric yawp,” which has been referenced a few times in this blog . But there’s another line in section 52 that I’ve always loved. Whitman writes, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless. Why look under our “boot-soles”? Because we might find evidence of some former self, some person we left in the dust as we made our way uneasily toward adulthood. For me, that would be a younger version of myself, someone who was more easily stirred by the wonder of the world. I have not forgotten about that earlier version of me, that kid who stared at the night sky from his suburban backyard for hours at a time, but as daily living gets more complicated it’s easy to lose contact with him. As Whitman says, it is “good health” to look for evidence of that former self under our boot-soles. Nina Ochoa do...