Freshman year.
The first time I went to Oklahoma in the fifth grade was for two different reasons, both pertaining to science, both involving my brother, Caden. The first reason was Caden and I had built a wind turbine one year for the science fair and after three months of letting it stand 20 yards tall in our backyard, we wanted to take it out to Oklahoma and see how it worked in the real wind. The second reason was that we were really interested in oil rigs.
It was spring break and we had begged our parents to take us to Oklahoma. Maybe ‘begged’ isn’t the right word, considering they generally happily obliged and went along with mine and Caden’s ideas. Like planting a garden of corn in the backyard, or having a cricket farm one summer. Even though my dad said as we were pulling out of the driveway, “It’s not too late to go to Florida,” he still pulled over on the side of the highway without argument whenever we saw a working oil rig.
Never did I think that 11 years later, I would be graduating from a school in Oklahoma. It wasn’t as linear a path as one might suspect though.
I graduated high school in May of 2020, two months after a state of emergency had been declared for the United States due to the global pandemic. I finished up my last weeks of senior year online for some classes, while others just gave up entirely on continuing the semester. I took my AP tests online from my bedroom with a blanket draped over my head to drown out the various sounds coming from different parts of my house, and because I thought there was a possibility that agents from College Board were watching us through our cameras and I wanted to keep them entertained.
It was also two months after I had been diagnosed with post concussion syndrome due to an untreated concussion I had acquired a year earlier while playing lacrosse. This after an entire year of visiting different specialists in hopes to figure out why I was dizzy and nauseous all the time. Three days before the school shut down, I had to tell my coach that I wouldn’t be able to play that spring semester, because if I got hit in the head again, I could get even worse. Three weeks later, the season was canceled for everyone.
While it may seem as though I was 18 with my life in shambles, I don’t believe that is the case. I did not believe that at the moment, either. My life was slow and quiet and mundane, but it was safe and that was exactly what I needed during that period of time to heal my head and the anxiety that came with my symptoms. I went on long, slow walks. I started eating again. I didn’t have to worry about having the stamina to sit in a classroom for eight hours on end.
One sunny afternoon, my mom told me to put on my cap and gown and follow her into the front yard, where my extended family was driving up and down the street honking their horns. They had big cutouts of my face glued to a yard stick, 2020 Grad decorations taped to the outside of cars, and my cousins squatting in the beds of pickup trucks. The neighbors started wandering outside to see what the ruckus was. They parked along the street and we ate cupcakes, standing awkwardly far away from each other in my front yard. After they left, my parents, Caden, and I ate dinner on the back porch, drank mocktails, and later when we were sitting by a fire, I gave my graduation speech in the backyard, standing on a bucket as my stage. Halfway through it started raining, the fire went out, and smoke started billowing all across the backyard and into our eyes. My notebook pages where the speech was written will forever be crinkled from the rain. I guess it was a good metaphor for how the year went.
The only reason I began to get uncomfortable was because I wasn’t learning anything. It wasn’t exactly boredom, just restlessness from not learning or having a schedule. I started taking courses at the local community college in June, C++ Programming and statistics, since I had opted out of taking a math class my senior year due to my symptoms. I already had enough math to graduate and was already taking enough hard classes.
I’m not sure when the decision was made to do my first year of college at the community college, or even if it was a deliberate decision I made. When the only colleges you apply to are ones you were planning on playing soccer at, and then suddenly you can’t play soccer anymore, the decision is kind of made for you. Since I started getting sick in the spring of my junior year, I hadn’t really been too fond of the idea of moving off to school somewhere else. I didn’t have an explanation for my symptoms and why I was so sick and I was scared to be alone because of them. Even once I got diagnosed, the symptoms were still sporadic and the last thing I wanted to do was leave my parents house for a college dorm. Since this was happening all of senior year, I believe I only applied to three schools.
All I remember is that even into July, past my birthday, when my uncles would ask me where I was going to university, I would say that I didn’t know. Then one day I started my first day of classes at the community college full time for general transfer studies. The in-betweens are foggy. I don’t remember much from that time.
That first semester I ended up taking six classes, but it added up to 26 credits because one, geology, was a lab. How do you do a geology lab online? Basically, there wasn’t really a lab. Sometimes the professor would send us pictures of rocks and we would have to tell him what kind of rock it was, which seemed wholly impossible and ridiculous given we couldn’t do a majority of the tests on the rock to identify it. I generally reverse Google image searched the rock pictures. The other five classes were intro to sociology, creative writing, biology, Spanish, and interpersonal communications.
While I was reading a lot about communicating interpersonally, I wasn’t doing too much practice. A majority of my friends, whom I hadn’t left in high school, still went off to college despite the dorm room quarantining. I felt like they were all beyond me, since I couldn’t seem to move out of my parents’ clutches. My mom would always reassure me that they were not sick like I was, but that didn’t make me feel much better. I didn’t want to be scared to leave my parents house or be sick. I did have two friends who stayed around, Nevaeh and Elodie. Naveah was supposed to go to an international dance school in Australia, but since their government was a lot stricter than ours, the program got pushed back a few months. She is very performative and I am very documentative and so our friendship thrived during an era where we both had a lot of free time. I would bring a backpack full of cameras and she would bring new choreography, and I would record it and edit it to post online. Or, she would bring her aerial silks to the park and I would climb up a tree to hang them around, then photograph her.
Halfway through September of 2020, I decided that it was possible I was ready to take a trip alone. Or at least without my parents. I’ve known Remington since kindergarten, when we would play soccer together and her dad, the coach, would yell at our team that we needed to spread out on the field, that we looked like a bunch of grapes in our purple uniforms. Remington, the mother to a very aggressive iguana, moved to Kentucky for college and I wanted to go visit her. I enlisted Neveah to go with me because she knew how hard it would be for me to go. My parents immediately said yes.
We planned to leave on Friday, Oct. 9 at 12 pm right after my biology class. So every Friday leading up, my mom and I would get in the car at 12 pm and we would drive down the highway 30 minutes in the direction of Kentucky so I could have a mock of what the road trip would be like. Because of the dizziness, I hadn’t driven a car in over six months.
Although I woke up every morning the week leading up to Oct. 9 nauseous from anxiety, I made the trip. I drove five hours down the highway, I slept in a bed that was not my own in a house that my parents were not in. I ate popcorn for dinner while watching The Notebook and I rode skateboards around a college campus in the rain without feeling I was Atlas, carrying the entire world on my shoulders. On the last day when we went into the dining hall to get sandwiches for the road, I looked around and, without thinking, thought to myself, “I could see myself here. I could totally do this.” It may seem dramatic to say, but that trip to Murray, Kentucky was the catalyst to the rest of my life.
Elodie was supposed to be going to school at Arizona State University, but she decided to defer for a semester because students were required to quarantine in their dorm rooms the entire semester and do all online classes. Elodie and I were racquetball doubles partners every winter, but we weren’t very close friends outside of that. Then senior year, the day before we were all flying to Portland, Oregon for Nationals, a tournament we were favored to win, was when I found out I had post concussion syndrome. I refused to take my parents' advice to stay home, because none of my teammates or coaches knew I was even struggling with health problems. I couldn’t just call them out of nowhere and say I wasn’t going. I had even won State the weekend before, which left me bedridden for two days. But when I was packing that night and passed out, I realized they were right. I didn’t want to play the tournament anyways, I knew it would make me sick.
Some people on the team took it poorly, the coaches were nice. I heard word from one of my teammates that Elodie was fighting with anyone who tried to say anything bad about me. She had struggled with concussion problems in middle school, and called me every evening before she went to bed to tell me about the tournament. During that tournament, we became close friends.
The weekend after I got back from Murray I went to Elodie’s house and we were walking her dog around the neighborhood before we stopped at a baseball field and she told me to sit down on the bench, she had a presentation for me. She proceeded to give me a well-rehearsed pitch about how I should move to Arizona with her for the spring semester. I was taking online classes and she didn’t want to live in the dorms with all the quarantine regulations back in place, and we could find a cheap apartment in Tempe and hike, mountain bike, and spend all day by the pool when we weren’t in classes. I was intrigued, and for the first time when someone talked to me about moving away from my hometown, my stomach didn’t start doing flips. When I got home that day, I told my mom to sit down on her bed, and gave her the same well-rehearsed presentation. She just looked at me,
“You really want to do this? Move to Arizona?”
I thought she was questioning whether Arizona was really the place I wanted to live.
“I mean it’s just one semester, I don’t know if I’ll stay there after that–” I started.
“I meant to say that this is the first time I’ve seen you talk about moving away with excitement in your eyes instead of dread ever since you got your concussion. Yes, you’re moving to Arizona.”
My dad immediately agreed. My parents met each other in Arizona, and before that my dad has lots of stories about living in his RV in the desert and riding his dirt bike around everyday after work. I feel like I’ve heard all the stories, but I probably haven’t even heard a fourth of them.
Elodie’s parents invited mine over for dinner one night that week. Apparently it was her mom’s idea for me to move as well, since we had spent so much time together in our hometown and she knew I was doing online classes. Her parents invited my family over in hopes to convince my parents to let me move to Arizona. They didn’t know my parents very well.
“Convince us to let her go? She’s going! When do we sign the lease?” My dad joked. I signed my lease on Oct. 31.
Around that time was also when I had to pick my classes for the spring semester at community college. Since I had a lot of AP classes from high school transfer over, I was going to get my associate’s degree in one year, by May. I wanted to keep taking six classes, but I only needed five more to graduate. My dad advised me to take classes towards the major I was planning to take at a four-year university, but I had no idea what that was.
When I was in high school planning to play sports, I was interested in exercise science but now that I couldn’t play contact sports, I knew it would feel like a punch in the gut anytime I went into those classes. I had thought some about art school too, or going for creative writing. My parents would support me for any major, but there’s no doubt they were worried I would study art and have no job prospects. So they enlisted Caden, who had graduated from college a semester early in December 2020, to begrudgingly help me pick a major that was smart, but also that I would enjoy.
Caden gave me two different lists. The first list was the top five majors that make the most money out of college – statistics, info systems, economics, finance, and industrial engineering. The second was eight areas of study he thought I might enjoy– industrial design, architecture, psychology, marketing, business, fine arts, art, and graphic design. He told me that I should pick my major from the first list, and a minor from the second. That way I could study something I was interested in while still having a safety net. He told me, “Studying something on the first list will give you a leg up and help you get a job in an industry on the second list.”
I did not like this list. My brother did not like that he had to give this list to me. There was tension over the Huntley household for days on end. I understood the thinking of picking a major and minor like this, but it also made me feel as though my family didn’t think my art was good enough to make a living off of. My brother was mad at my parents because they made him help me and he felt poorly about possibly forcing me into a major I was going to be miserable in. My parents were mad at my brother for presenting the information to me in such a straightforward, factual manner. I think, up until this day, Caden still feels bad about influencing me into economics which I had to study for the next three years, even though I try to tell him all the time that I’m glad I studied it.
I chose economics over the other ones for reasons that are not at all good enough explanations for an inquiring professor or hiring manager. It was the major on the list with the least amount of math, had the least amount of courses which meant I could get it over quickly, I liked business, and Caden studied economics in college and sometimes I read the books he was assigned. For my sixth class spring semester, I took microeconomics.
The day I left for Phoenix was very odd, because I was not nervous at all. The car was packed and my dad and I were pulling out of the driveway and the only sadness I felt was for my dog, as Scout would not know why I had left all of the sudden and nobody would be able to tell her that I was coming back. I kept trying to muster up some kind of anxiety because the lack thereof was making me nervous. When you live in a certain mindset for so long it’s uncomfortable and scary to stop living that way, even though it was a very bad mindset. I became comfortable in my bad mindset and although I was now in a better mindset, it was an unknown and foreign place, therefore making me miss the place I knew so well.
It took my dad and I eight hours a day for three days to reach Phoenix, and when I unpacked my clothes it was all t-shirts.
If my first semester of college at home was my period of static healing, then living in Phoenix was my period of dynamic healing. I climbed a mountain with my dad the second day we got there, and didn’t stop until I left in mid-May. Every morning I would wake up at the same time and walk past palm trees to the small gym we had on our apartment complex and work out before my morning classes. It was always empty. One wall of the gym was all windows, which pointed out to the pool. After my classes and assignments, I would regularly bike for over 10 miles at the park on the river, or lay down to tan and read on the singular grass patch. I read 30 books in the six month span. Halfway through, I got a membership at the nearby gym because it had racquetball courts, so Elodie and I kept playing. I didn’t have a car, so I biked everywhere with a backpack on. The gym was farther away, almost a mile, but it was right next to the public library where I got my books, and the whole path there was residential houses with palm trees, so I didn’t mind.
I was also doing a lot of video editing while there. I was working with an international production company to create videos for an audience of 700,000 people around the world. I was always on Zoom meetings with my team, filming clips for our videos, and editing on Premiere by the pool. I was also an article editor and video editor for a mental health initiative that one of my friends from high school, Ada, founded.
When the weather got hot enough, I started swimming and reading out by the pool. Sitting by the pool is how we get Oklahoma back into the story. One day I was on Instagram when I saw a band I liked, Surfaces, was performing in Austin at an outdoor venue in June and the tickets were only $20. I immediately called my mom to see if she would drive down to Austin with me and, once again, there was no hesitation to say yes. I would be back in my hometown by then, which is 12 hours away from Austin, meaning we would need to stop somewhere along the way. Directly in the middle was Tulsa, Oklahoma.
My mom suggested that we stay the night in Tulsa, and remembered that one of Caden’s best friends, Gable, went to school around Tulsa. She said that we should stay there so we could tour the university in the morning before leaving for Austin. I agreed. At that point, I was basically applying to any college that I had ever heard of, even in passing, so that all the work was done and I just had to figure out some way to decide what school I actually wanted to go to. I knew I was studying economics, but I didn’t know anything about where I wanted to live, or what industry I wanted to work in after college, or what kind of university I wanted, so I was just applying to them all.
I saw Caden later that month. He drove into Phoenix to take me to the Grand Canyon for my graduation. The community college was doing an outdoor graduation back in my hometown, but I didn’t want to leave Phoenix that early so Caden brought my cap from high school and he took a picture of me standing on the rim with it on to send to our parents. Caden also scheduled a lunch with me, him, and Gable when I returned home so I could ask him anything I wanted to about the school in Oklahoma.
By the time my mom and I arrived on campus in June, I already knew the basics from him. The grounds were gorgeous, especially in the early summer when everything was still alive. At that point, I had only applied a month ago and had yet to hear back about my acceptance. I tried not to like the campus that much, as I thought the acceptance rate was low and I wasn’t sure I would actually get in. We walked the small campus and visited some of the famous spots in town before heading to Austin. That same day, just an hour outside of Austin, I received an email saying I had been accepted into the university with the highest scholarship they offer.
It wasn’t until late July that I finally picked the school in Tulsa as mine. My parents were excited, Caden too. He told me that he had almost gone there, that it was between Tulsa and the school that he ended up going to. I wasn’t too enthusiastic. I didn’t really feel like I had picked Tulsa, it was just three weeks before school started and I had to pick a school and there was Tulsa. I was ready to go to a real college in person and make some new friends, but I didn’t feel like my life had led up to this moment. When I was a senior in high school talking to people older than me about how they picked a college, they always responded, “You just know. You see all these colleges and they’re fine, but then you hear about one and you step onto the campus and you realize that’s the one for you.” I didn’t have that experience. I was just nearing a deadline, and knew that I didn’t have any more time to step onto a campus and have that feeling, so I picked Tulsa.
That’s the hard thing about being 18 and picking a school. I had no idea what I was looking for. I didn’t know that students usually get hired in the city they go to school in so I should have picked a town I wanted to live in after graduation. I didn’t know that it would be smart to pick a school that had an emphasis on my major because then there were more recruiters and alumni in that field. I didn’t know what kind of things I should be looking for on campus. All I knew is that I didn’t want to go to a school where all the buildings are brick. Caden used to get frustrated with me when he would ask me about college as it started to get closer to the deadline to pick. He had already graduated by then and knew all these things that I did not know, especially when he would bring me to meet with his friends and ask them questions. He would say, “Callie, you have to ask them questions. Like about the alumni networks, the job boards, how registration works, how well the school is connected to the city's employers…” I just stared at him.
I told my parents I picked Tulsa right before leaving on yet another road trip to visit Remington. This time, she was in Colorado working for the Gunnison National Forest. It was a two day drive, and the only time an advisor was available to meet with me to schedule my Tulsa classes was in the afternoon of the first day. So I left my parents house early in the morning, drove all day, then pulled off the road in a small town somewhere in Kansas to get a smoothie and register for my college classes while sitting on the bench in a grass field.
Most of the classes I needed were already full since I was registering so late. The advisor signed me up for different classes that I didn’t really need. After the call, I disappointedly told Caden I didn’t get into many classes. He told me to just email the professors of the classes I wanted to be in, asking if they would take one more student. I got into all the classes I wanted that way.
This was the first part to a four part series.
Yours truly,
Calihan