I haven't been able to stop thinking about the last boy I babysat for. Back then, he was a little kid playing kickball with me in his backyard. His father was the minister of the church I'd attended with my family for years and years, though at that point I'd become a full-blown atheist. The boy was all dimpled joy compared to his thinner, more serious older brother. Soon thereafter, I escaped that corner of the country and largely forgot about the boy. The boy became a teenager. The teenager committed suicide.

I can't pretend not to know how a person can get so desperate, so determined. I can't pretend to forget that I once wrote my friends trying to convince them that it didn't matter if things would get better. The unbearable was unbearable. I'm thankful that they weren't so easily convinced. I'm thankful for my own fear.

Mixed in with the bits and bothers of my desk, I keep my Bennington diploma and have since I received it. It's not on display for others or there to feed my occasional bouts of nostalgia, but rather, as a reminder of a community to which I am indebted. There's plenty of monetary debt, sure, but there's also my identity as a writer that the people, place and process brought to me.

I'm thankful that I lived to find that identity and hopeful that, someday, I'll find a few words to prove me worthy of it.