Hello all! You probably thought after last week’s disappearing act that I’ve ditched the newsletter life for good, but I’ve just decided to send bi-weekly updates instead of weekly ones. TBH, I figured it’d be way easier to come up with 26 things to write about instead of 52, and once the semester starts back up I won’t have as many brain cells to devote to things that are not my thesis *dun dun dun*.
That being said, next week starts my last semester of grad school, and the last semester of any kind of school for me ever, fingers crossed! Since returning to Madison a little under two weeks ago, I’ve hit the ground running and have been back to meetings, appointments, friend hangs, and all the things that make this lake town go round. I’m dreading the soul-sucking rhythm of the semester and will really miss the pace I’ve created for myself over the past month (lots of reading, making art, watching good TV/film, and piling one writing project on top of the other), but the thing that’s really keeping me going is the thought of being able to continue on with my passions and hobbies in a balanced way once I’m no longer living the hashtag Student Life. It might be a bit of wishful thinking since I also know how the 9-5 life drains you, but hey, let a girl motivate herself with the thought of some semi-greener grass, okay?
Onwards, shall we?
THE WEEK IN GRATITUDE
Obviously since I’m no longer in New York, I had to transport myself back to Madison somehow, which, unlike my four year old cousin Rei might think, does not involve teleportation. It did, however, involve a 16-hour road trip split evenly between me and my boyfriend, who happened to be visiting the East Coast during the tail end of my stay there. We had a really sweet time talking endlessly, sharing music, and judging rest stop bathrooms as the weather became colder and colder the further west we went. While we were apart, we agreed to read bell hooks’ A Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love and shared our thoughts and impressions of it on the ride home. It was a great way to learn alongside each other and talk about things we wouldn’t otherwise have the language for. I’m really grateful for the intentional work we put into growing our emotional relationship and seeking out things that mean a lot to the both of us.
A little over a week ago I officially started writing for Madison365, a local news source that aims to amplify the voices and perspectives of people of color in the greater Madison area and beyond. With graduation on the horizon, My Next Steps have been weighing heavy on my mind and I’ve been thinking a lot about my passions and what opportunities I can take to really honor them. I always felt like going to grad school was a way for me to “buy time” before I decided what I actually wanted to do with my life. Writing has always been a constant for me and I’m starting to realize that the more I delay actually pursuing it, the farther away I’m placing myself from reaching my dreams. I’m really excited and grateful for this opportunity and I’m excited to get back into the tempo of news writing. You can find my first story for them (which came out yesterday) here.
One of the things that I was most excited about doing when I got back to Madison was picking up my Room order. A Room of One’s Own is not only a Virginia Woolf essay, but a worker-owned queer radical bookstore here in Madison and I 100% encourage you to follow them on social media and order books from them if you don’t already do so. To my surprise, my package came with two extra books and a sweet little note from Alej, one of the booksellers who I know through another awesome org in Madison called Communication. My heart is so warm by the seemingly boundless amount of love the people I’ve met in Madison have to give and I feel so lucky to know them. Alej, if you’re reading this, I appreciate you so much back and hope we get to see each other again soon! <3
POEM OF THE WEEK
So… I’m still on that non-poetry kick and have been busy producing a bunch of complete sentences as of late (I’ve written about 13,000 words since the end of December in the form of various creative nonfiction projects, articles, Substack essays, etc. and I just can’t seem to stop. And that total’s not even counting all the dang cover letters I’ve written…). I did, however, sit down with Louise Glück’s latest collection of poetry Winter Recipes from the Collective: Poems and have been mulling over some of the pieces in it over the past week. “A Denial of Death,” which could in some ways be described as a lyric essay, struck me in its unique address to an absent and lost love. If you’re familiar with any of my work, you know that I’m no stranger to this topic. The poem is in the form of travel diary entries and has a bit of an Eat Pray Love vibe to it. It’s a bit of a longer piece but the interesting ending is 100% sitting down with.
I always told myself that if I ever got into grad school, I’d do two things: First, I’d get a pixie cut, and second, I’d start going by the name that my family called me. And while I still have long locks that are black, brown, purple, and some last hints of blue (RIP my bathroom dye job from three weeks ago), there do exist a handful of people in Madison who call me Mae. It’s been a weird transition for that name to move outside of my family, for me to be known by people who haven’t known me my entire life as such.
My name has always been a point of shame. It’s unique in that way where no one ever gets it right on the first try, or the seventh try, so you resign to just being called whatever wrong name they heard. I jokingly tell others that I hate anyone named Olivia because there are so many songs written for Olivia’s, and I’m 100% certain that no one will ever return the favor to me (Bon Iver was super close with Roslyn, though). It’s taken me a long time to lean into its one of a kind nature and don’t know that I ever fully will in all spaces I enter—I still fib at coffee shops and tell them my name is Robin, just because I don’t want to deal with the fuss. Sometimes, allowing other people to call me Mae feels like a cop out (both because it’s easier and more common), but there are also moments where it feels liberating, like I’m stepping into a fuller self.
On the ride over to our weekly religion class (lol) in the first grade, I looked over at my neighbor and childhood best friend and said gravely, “Please don’t call me Mae over there. Please please please call me Rodlyn.” I didn’t know it at the time, but this was my first attempt at making a delineation between what happened in my home life and my life out in the world—which, at the age of six, mostly comprised of a predominantly white school in a predominantly white and affluent suburban town. My entire family called me Mae, or a slight variation of the name (Mae-Mae, Memae, etc.), a name wrapped in affection and a fond sense of closeness. It was the name reserved for my inner circle, the people who knew me most intimately.
For the most part my friend obliged, and in the few instances that she slipped up, my eyes would widen in horror until she corrected herself. Looking back on it now, this anxiety over what I was referred to and by whom is such an obvious manifestation of that child-of-immigrants experience of living in two worlds, of straddling two wholly different experiences at the threshold of your house’s front door. Maybe because I lived in a town that exacerbated my racial difference in every space outside of my home, I wanted the opportunity to build an identity around the name Rodlyn, to try my best to fit in with the others by taking away the thing that marked my otherness. By asking my friend to abide by my code-switching, I was making sure that she wouldn’t blow my cover.
And while those with “foreign” names often take on an American name in order to assimilate better into the dominant culture, it was my public-facing name that made me stick out like a sore thumb in school. Since I was a child, I’ve always dreaded attendance/roll call, waiting in humiliation as my teachers squinted and stumbled over “Rodlyn” (To this day this still perplexes me… It’s literally two syllables and no tricky sounds). Instead of getting ahead of them and asserting the correct pronunciation, I’d accommodate others’ comfort and pride at the cost of my misidentification, folding into the reflex of making myself small.
Given the rich history that my name holds, I really ought to be more proud of it. RODLYN-MAE is a name that my parents created to honor some very important people in our lives. “Rod” borrows from the names of my two grandfathers, Rodolfo and Rodrigo, who both played significant parts in shaping my parents’ lives. Though I never met my maternal grandfather, I know that his disciplinary and hard working natures live on in my mother. My Lolo Rudy, who passed away last summer, was like a second father to me and is responsible for countless of my happy memories as a young person. The second half “-lyn” derives from my Lola Lina, one of my dad’s aunts on his mother’s side. She was a huge help to my parents when they moved from Florida to New York, making sure that they were settling in okay and ready to start a family of their own (starring me, of course, the Leo first child of Roman and Imelda). In many senses, my name is an amalgamation of the generations of sweat and grit it took to make the life my parents gave me—one characterized by sacrifice in the heart of diaspora to achieve the American dream.
And now that I’ve used every first-generation buzz word possible, you might be wondering where the “Mae” comes from. Unfortunately, there is no great back story to the second part of my name. My mom and dad tacked it on just to make my name sound more feminine (and without their realizing, a lot more Southern). While hardly anyone calls me by my full first name (that, my friends, is reserved for moments of deep maternal wrath) I can see how each of its two parts have taken on such distinct forms and people who at times don’t even seem like they should coexist (Insert an “inside you there are two wolves” joke here).
Rodlyn—a sharp student, strong writer, and capable educator—is taken seriously. The hardness of the consonants that surround her on all sides stand testament to her toughness, of the perseverance it took to accomplish every goal she set for herself and every room she chose to enter. Perhaps more accurately, though, she is also a symbol the softness that she’s had to shed in order to “make it” in certain spaces, especially those that were purposefully designed to keep women and people of color out. Either way, she has established herself as someone worth listening to. And while Mae has always denoted kinship, there is something about her that is childish—almost frozen in time. She is the little girl who knows not a clue about how the world works, whose only job has ever been to keep her head down and do as she is told. She is the one who doesn’t know anything about cars (except how to park them), who dreams too big, and always needs someone to rescue her. She is the one who, when called out in public, is reminded of everything she is not.
This dichotomy has existed for the majority of my life, and before writing this out, I don’t know that I was aware of how much I’ve let it define me. But ever since moving to Madison, the sharp contrasts I’ve drawn for these two selves have been shifting, and at times, I feel strongly as though this “Mae” person has been reborn in Madison. To be clear: the only reason so many people in Madison call me Mae is because this is the biggest Filipino community I’ve ever had (yes, we are all equally as flabbergasted as you are, dear reader). And while Mae has historically been reserved for other Filipinos, a handful of non-Pinoys also refer to me as such here (e.g. a select few partners of friends). It’s within this ever-growing community that I’ve been given the courage to reclaim my secret identity, the one I spent so much of my childhood trying to make disappear. Every time someone calls me Mae here, I am once again given permission to step further into my self, to embrace the inner child that had been dodging acknowledgment for so long for the sake of fitting in, of wanting to be seen in a certain way. And to embrace the complexity of Mae is to embrace who she was before and who she is now.
The deal I had made with myself all those years ago was perhaps a subconscious yearning to be this version of me who is fearless and driven without having to compromise her kindness and tenderness. She is the inner child crawling out after building so many walls around her so that she wouldn’t be seen. She is the person who decides to just go for things because she has spent so many years being praised for all the things that she is not or never wanted to be. These days, in this new life—in this life filled with love and beautiful nuance—I am asking myself this: What does it mean to lean into the softness of my name, to let my lips come together and vibrate to form its sound, encompassing and warm, to evade the hard, resistant touch of teeth and bone? In asking this, I’m reminded of one of my favorite poems of all time, “Love After Love” by Derek Walcott and its lines:
You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart.
In the spirit of messiness, this isn’t exactly permission for new people to call me Mae. So many of my closest friends still call me Rodlyn, and I don’t love them any less for it. For me, honoring the complexities of how I am known and how I am choosing to know myself is the first step in expanding my horizons and celebrating every which path this new Mae chooses to go down. And I’ll follow her down every one.