Why, Hello There
My name is Cheyenne. Like the Native Americans, or like the capital of Wyoming, or like the river, or like Marlon Brando's deceased daughter [none of which I happen to have any affiliation with].
I am from Birmingham, Alabama, as strange as it seems to say that.
My family moved here [for good] when I was not quite even 3, so saying I am from anywhere else doesn't really make much sense.
I'm certainly not from Newcastle, England, where my dad was born and raised, and where his family lives, and where we went to visit every year, consistently, until I was about 17.
And I'm certainly not from the Appalachian Mountains, the border between Virginia and Tennessee, where my mom grew up, and where her family still mostly lives [though leaves of us have scattered as far as New York, Istanbul].
My parents both left long-rooted, deep-seeded homes to end up here, in the Steel City, with no family and no friends, and planted me here in a valley, surrounded by city, by coal, by iron ore, red mountains, tall buildings, dark luster, and hope [hope, perhaps, being handled by the wrong hands, but hope nonetheless]. Streets, avenues, boulevards. Suburbs. Shopping centers. Traffic lights.
My dad worked hard in the mining industry, inventing, building machines. Then I attended one of the medical schools in the entire country, UAB, to study English and Creative Writing. This always seemed like an odd choice, especially with the University of Montevallo, the creative hub of Alabama universities, and UA in Tuscaloosa, with its MFA program, both so close. But really, it's because I spent so much time learning to love Birmingham.
This city has struggled, does struggle. Every visit to another city, even Atlanta, serves as a reminder that I don't live in a "real" city. Our politicians are any empath's worst nightmare, our state's education, health, and teen pregnancy rates drag us to the bottom of the barrel, the name Birmingham is still mostly known because of its racist past, George Wallace [whose name still squats on the corner of the Humanities Building at my alma mater, the building I may as well have grown up in]; but nevertheless, I believe in my city.
I believe in my community.
And it's been growing lately, I know, I just know it's trying to do better.
These days community is more important than ever, I think. As someone who spent most of her life believing she didn't belong to one, only to find that this Magic City wasn't just made of the perfect combination of earth materials to make steel, but of just the perfect combination of human qualities to make a strong individual, I want to help speak about the turmoil growing up in a place like this puts you in. You love a place so much, but see it so rotten, so corrupted by people who think they own it—you're never sure whether to run, be with more like-minded people somewhere far away, or to stay and fight for positive change. This does not get easier, only harder.
That said, this is not going to be an important blog. I will not say anything that will change lives. I will not say anything that another young person hasn't already said or thought or done a million times before. I will not go through anything that the average young human in the United States hasn't gone through a million times before.
But I do like having a blog, and I like having a space for my thoughts, because like most people, I like to be heard sometimes, or at least just to listen to myself speak. I like to have a place to practice writing, the thing I love best.
A new blog [or new Facebook, or new Twitter, or whatever it is] is a bit like a skin shed for us millennials/gen y's/whatever we're called. There's something invigorating about reinventing how we are seen over and over and over, renouncing bits of our former selves again and again. Of course, these days you can never really shake the evidence of your growth, your naiveté. A digital bread crumb trail follows your whole life.
I'm still only twenty-five. In some form or another, chunks of a whole decade of my life are floating around on the Internet somewhere—an old, cringe-worthy middle school LiveJournal account I can't get into to delete, a Myspace that's probably eleven years old, a Facebook that turned ten last fall—all tracking my transition from preteen to teenager to young adult, middle to high school to college and beyond. I have almost a whole life timelined digitally.
Even this post is recycled, made up of parts of old blogs and injected with new ideas.
The future is a cloudy thing; it's been a lot of fun to speculate about it, question it, and see if all the things we thought were too crazy to be true actually turned out to be the thing to do. My generation, having been more or less the guinea pig generation, the first "digital natives," are watching our lives expand at dizzying rates. Tradition, normalcy, has never been a thing that lasted altogether too long for us.
Of course, now is a different time for the world. For everyone. It's not as easy as fun speculation anymore. Even the most passive of us feel the pressure to choose a side, to feel angry about something, to pick apart our values and scream them at someone else. It's very hard not to do this. I never thought I would get caught up in it, either.
But we've now seen the things we thought were too crazy to be true pan out in ways that terrify us. So, even if we're just speaking into a void, like into this blog, at least we are practicing something. We are exercising something. Our ability to communicate is everything, and we must do what we can to secure it. This is why I'm doing this again. This is why I'm here.
I hope you find something you like, if you find this at all.
I am from Birmingham, Alabama, as strange as it seems to say that.
My family moved here [for good] when I was not quite even 3, so saying I am from anywhere else doesn't really make much sense.
I'm certainly not from Newcastle, England, where my dad was born and raised, and where his family lives, and where we went to visit every year, consistently, until I was about 17.
And I'm certainly not from the Appalachian Mountains, the border between Virginia and Tennessee, where my mom grew up, and where her family still mostly lives [though leaves of us have scattered as far as New York, Istanbul].
My parents both left long-rooted, deep-seeded homes to end up here, in the Steel City, with no family and no friends, and planted me here in a valley, surrounded by city, by coal, by iron ore, red mountains, tall buildings, dark luster, and hope [hope, perhaps, being handled by the wrong hands, but hope nonetheless]. Streets, avenues, boulevards. Suburbs. Shopping centers. Traffic lights.
My dad worked hard in the mining industry, inventing, building machines. Then I attended one of the medical schools in the entire country, UAB, to study English and Creative Writing. This always seemed like an odd choice, especially with the University of Montevallo, the creative hub of Alabama universities, and UA in Tuscaloosa, with its MFA program, both so close. But really, it's because I spent so much time learning to love Birmingham.
This city has struggled, does struggle. Every visit to another city, even Atlanta, serves as a reminder that I don't live in a "real" city. Our politicians are any empath's worst nightmare, our state's education, health, and teen pregnancy rates drag us to the bottom of the barrel, the name Birmingham is still mostly known because of its racist past, George Wallace [whose name still squats on the corner of the Humanities Building at my alma mater, the building I may as well have grown up in]; but nevertheless, I believe in my city.
I believe in my community.
And it's been growing lately, I know, I just know it's trying to do better.
These days community is more important than ever, I think. As someone who spent most of her life believing she didn't belong to one, only to find that this Magic City wasn't just made of the perfect combination of earth materials to make steel, but of just the perfect combination of human qualities to make a strong individual, I want to help speak about the turmoil growing up in a place like this puts you in. You love a place so much, but see it so rotten, so corrupted by people who think they own it—you're never sure whether to run, be with more like-minded people somewhere far away, or to stay and fight for positive change. This does not get easier, only harder.
That said, this is not going to be an important blog. I will not say anything that will change lives. I will not say anything that another young person hasn't already said or thought or done a million times before. I will not go through anything that the average young human in the United States hasn't gone through a million times before.
But I do like having a blog, and I like having a space for my thoughts, because like most people, I like to be heard sometimes, or at least just to listen to myself speak. I like to have a place to practice writing, the thing I love best.
A new blog [or new Facebook, or new Twitter, or whatever it is] is a bit like a skin shed for us millennials/gen y's/whatever we're called. There's something invigorating about reinventing how we are seen over and over and over, renouncing bits of our former selves again and again. Of course, these days you can never really shake the evidence of your growth, your naiveté. A digital bread crumb trail follows your whole life.
I'm still only twenty-five. In some form or another, chunks of a whole decade of my life are floating around on the Internet somewhere—an old, cringe-worthy middle school LiveJournal account I can't get into to delete, a Myspace that's probably eleven years old, a Facebook that turned ten last fall—all tracking my transition from preteen to teenager to young adult, middle to high school to college and beyond. I have almost a whole life timelined digitally.
Even this post is recycled, made up of parts of old blogs and injected with new ideas.
The future is a cloudy thing; it's been a lot of fun to speculate about it, question it, and see if all the things we thought were too crazy to be true actually turned out to be the thing to do. My generation, having been more or less the guinea pig generation, the first "digital natives," are watching our lives expand at dizzying rates. Tradition, normalcy, has never been a thing that lasted altogether too long for us.
Of course, now is a different time for the world. For everyone. It's not as easy as fun speculation anymore. Even the most passive of us feel the pressure to choose a side, to feel angry about something, to pick apart our values and scream them at someone else. It's very hard not to do this. I never thought I would get caught up in it, either.
But we've now seen the things we thought were too crazy to be true pan out in ways that terrify us. So, even if we're just speaking into a void, like into this blog, at least we are practicing something. We are exercising something. Our ability to communicate is everything, and we must do what we can to secure it. This is why I'm doing this again. This is why I'm here.
I hope you find something you like, if you find this at all.
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