Walking away from my long and nervous subway trudge, I entered the elevator. The air inside was claimed by the arduous silence, yet when the muffled clicks marking floor numbers reached eighteen and the doors opened, the feeling of excitement and anticipation wafted around me as I placed my foot carefully onto the eighteenth floor. Thinking back on that feeling now, it was not excitement: it was a feeling of smiles.
At the GWN orientation last week, we did a lot of activities—so many that when I try to list them, my brain freezes and instead says we all played double-dutch together. And we did, almost. We were all jumping to the same rhythm—the rhythm of being a woman (or a girl) in NYC, and the rhythm of our shared appreciation for writing.
During Opening Lines, the questions prompted me in such a way that I didn’t realize until I started writing my answer down that I’d be pouring my heart out onto silver paper. Through sitting down and moving my pen for 10 minutes, I met more of myself, and through those answers that held the core of me, I became a part of a spectacularly green web. Through tangling, dropping, twisting, fumbling, and forgetting, we laughed our way to both knowing one another and realizing we are connected to everyone through the experiences, dreams, and values that make up our lives.
Later I speed dated–and by the next morning, I woke up to a (wonderful) sore throat. Through all of my throat’s bitter attempts to convince me otherwise, I can honestly say that I loved the experience. Although I answered a lot of questions, I ended up learning a lot about each mentor based on what questions she asked. I learned about good movies I should watch, books I should read, and most importantly, I got a glimpse of the personalities of the mentors.
I did not expect such a diverse range of values—respect, community, support, passion, personal freedom, and more, yet looking from the list of GWN values to the delightfully multi-colored night sky filled with all of the mentors and mentees’ different values, I realized it is our values that come together to form one big wonderful, jam-packed GWN value set. That each of our own individual worlds, as new as they are to the each of us, forms a large, new world that we are all a part of.
I am incredibly happy and honored to be one of the shades of stars in the “Girls Write Now Galaxy.” And as much as I love this night sky, I am looking forward to the year to come, and I know that these stars will watch us from the other side of the sunrise.