On Kansas

When things would feel particularly dire over the last two years, I would think to myself about how good it would feel to write that goodbye to Kansas piece. How triumphant it would be to finally realize what I had failed to do after high school, and refused to give up on after two years of college. Charlie Andrade was leaving! To Boston! Forever! And ever! And-one-more-ever-just-in-case-you-had-any-doubt! How amazing, I thought, that must feel. How worth it would be, I would reassure myself, to finally show everyone who had doubted you could do this that Charlie Andrade would always get back up off the mat and keep swinging.

Which is why when I first sat down to write this in early August, I thought it would come so easy—that the story would flow as gracefully and naturally as I imagined it would. Quickly, though, I would learn how wrong I was. How any opener I liked meant another opener I had to toss—and with it, another part of the last two years that felt impossible not to include. How every feeling seemed to contradict another and create the impression of a shallow pride covering a mushy mess of bitterness. It felt nothing like the triumphant hero holding his arms above his head at the top of the tallest mountain that I thought it would be.

My mistake, I have come to realize, was thinking that such a feeling was necessary for me to write the piece I wanted to write. The victory I was searching for would, in reality, be totally antithetical to the two years I had experienced—and thus, was never coming. I would never be sitting on my front porch or staring up at the ceiling at night and suddenly realize that I had finally made it. The words were never going to come easy, and the story never going to perfectly fit the constraints of a few thousand words. Worse, the longer I waited the more I risked allowing the raw emotions of a tumultuous two years to melt into a neatly ordered story of how I loved Kansas, but wanted bigger things.

Because that would be a lie. I hated Kansas. I hated living in a place that felt so far away from it all. I hated that when I would tell a European I was from America, they would tell me the three states they knew: New York, California, and Kansas. Kansas, of course, representing the vast nothingness in between the places where everyone who is anyone lived. I hated that my passion for politics was stuck in a state where, every two years, the Republican Party tries to pass the “Kill the Puppies and Drown the Babies Act” only to lose by ten points. I hated that if I included that I was from Kansas in a cold email to someone I admired, they would be more likely to respond—as if I really was a peasant groveling to a passing noble for a spare coin. And, most of all, I hated that I couldn’t ever say I hated it.

For completely understandable reasons, nobody wants to hear another person complain about a place they like. And, even if they did, what good would it do? What difference would it make if I grabbed every single person in Kansas and listed every single thing I hated? The answer, obviously, is nothing. If I wanted to leave, it would be incumbent on me to figure out the path out.

This is the point in an essay where the author pivots to how this loneliness taught them self-reliance—about how what was bad for them then ended up being good for them now. I already feel that voice in my head warning me to hedge my negativity with some type of positive lesson I can take away. A big reason I struggled to write this piece was that I could never find the lesson that made it all feel, in retrospect, worthwhile. I already knew what hard work took! I knew, too, the value of perseverance! Even if I was completely foreign to all things bad and difficult, I still would think that these last two years were far more than what was necessary to get the message.

I think, maybe, if I had ended up getting into one of those fancy Ivy League schools in May, I might be making that pivot here. I might have the faux humility to wax about how I’ll always miss the quiet Kansas prairie (even if I never grew up near it) or that beautiful Kansas sunset (even if I think it’s the same setting sun everywhere on Earth). I was always jealous of those that got to leave Kansas after high school for this reason—that they could come back for 1/365th of the year, post a photo of the sunset to their story, and show all their coastal friends the village they came from. I would always wonder what those people who went to St-Automatic-Ivy-Admission-Preparatory-School in Manhattan would think when they saw those posts. Were they fooled? Interested? Indifferent?

I always felt, and probably still do, a twinge of insecurity when I would visit a friend in DC or Boston and tell their circle I was from… Kansas. I would always follow up that I was, rest assured, about to transfer to a place that satellites can see at night. I wanted them to see that I was like them. That I liked the things they liked. That I talked the way they talked. That I was interested in the things they were interested in. That, ultimately, I was one and the same—a shipwrecked sailor desperately waving his shirt above a fire in the hopes a passerby would see the smoke and return him to civilization.

Nobody put more thought into Kansas or KU than myself. Yet again I am tempted to turn this into a lesson on humility—about how the real victory was being comfortable with myself. But that would also be a lie. Because my frustration with Kansas and indignation with KU was never about myself but about the world that those at the top just wouldn’t acknowledge. That it did matter, actually, that I lived in Kansas. That it did affect my career, in fact, to go to a public university in the Midwest. That underneath all of their “college is what you make of it!” and “well I’m sure it’s not thattt bad” was an unfair truth about an unfair world. That searching for a lesson about these last two years was to imply that my anger was unjustified and bitterness misplaced.

Over time, I came to accept that I wouldn’t fit in at those fancy schools any more than I fit in at KU. The vitality that I thought lay behind the single digits of the U.S. News & World Report College Rankings was, it turned out, an illusion. I would never feel any pride in saying I was interning at McKinsey, and I could never smile and nod when someone said they wanted to go to the worst two words in the English language: law school. I would always be searching for some magical place filled with people who saw the world as broken as I did but still had the energy and wherewithal to believe they could—and would—change it for the better. In other words, I just couldn’t shut up.

I expected these last few days before Boston to feel like a messy goodbye—that the full weight of the last two years and excitement for the next two would collapse onto each other. But that hasn’t happened. Everything I thought it would be turned out to be wrong. That doesn’t mean I’m not excited. I’m more excited to move with my best friend to the best city on earth than anything I have ever been excited for. I’m so excited that I didn’t go back to the previous sentence to find a suitable synonym for excited so it would read better. Charlie Andrade is going to Boston!!!!