Life without a callous

I have a mammoth callous on the ring finger of my right hand. Its true, I do. Its been there towering over the rest of my finger for as long as I can recall. Its as much a part of me as the freckle on the bottom of my foot or my horrid widows peak, and yet it is not something I was born with. It is in fact the child of the insane amount of force with which I apply writing utensils to the page. I can remember being made to learn to write in i t a l i c s as a child (pre-everyonehasahomecomputer-era) and ripping through the page with my ball point pen. Miss Kitty, my kindergarten teacher, scolded me for gripping the crayons so fiercely (but I was just so hyper focused on staying inside the lines, I couldn't help it). By the end of a single page in my Little House on the Prairie Diary I would have to shake my hand to get the blood flowing again (year 9 was quite full of an angst that only Laura Ingalls could appreciate). I have grown out of many things in my life: chomping on Bubble Tape, obsessing over seed beads, and finally letting go of overalls at 14 - but to this day when I set down the pen my knuckles are reliably white and smarting. The long term ramification of this habit is, of course, The Callous. I can remember being disgusted by its stubborn existence in high school, rejoicing when July rolled around and the relief of summer vacation had diminished its prominence. For some reason though, I no longer find its presence offensive. This callous is quite literally the product of notes and drafts and blue books and essays and highlighting and highlighting and highlighting, and circling "true" (No, false. No, true, No actually false. No, really, I'm wretched at true/false) and flash cards and outlines and poster boards (when I'm lucky, I do so love attacking things with scissors and a glue stick...) and signing my name on a roll, profoundly declaring my presence and my role. This trifling, ugly little bit of me is the external evidence of how much being a student is who I am - who I have been since Miss Kitty's class when I learned that finishing an assignment doesn't mean you get to go around and show other students how to do it (I believe, quite frankly, that she told me she'd like to hot glue gun my "cheeks to my chair" if she could).

In one week my college career will ostensibly come to a close. I will walk out of my last class into the empty pages of my planner. From there I have a few events written in ink: Graduation with an exclamation point, Laura's wedding with three. A concert here, a birthday there, a movie night in pencil and then... nothing. My planners are not accustomed to empty pages. "Tuition fee due," "First day of class!" "Last day of drop/add," "Test," and "Paper due," typically riddle the pages months and weeks in advance. "Babysitting," "Kudu with so and so," "small group," "Sullys," and "house dinner" constantly reside in the gaps between. And so it has been for the past four years, and much the same for the first two decades of my life. Oh I have no doubt that the pages will fill to the brim, what inspires trepidation is the not knowing just what I will be writing on them. The successful student in me is timorously clinging to my callous. Clinging because it has been so much a part of me; grasping because I don't know what life will be without it.