In college I was paired with a girl named Pashawnda. She is a black woman from Pittsburgh or at least was in 1999. These days it’s not safe to assume anyone is who they used to be. Anyway, we were paired together ironically on the 3rd floor of a dorm that was built at the turn of last century for rich little girls and their personal servants.  The top floor is where the help lived. The irony is that servant girls went to Bryn Mawr but don’t point that out in their presence.  As a group, feminists can be a bit prickly. 

That particular 3rd floor is renown for dissonance among roommates and our year proved the rule. with all but one pair of roommates applying for room changes before December.  At Bryn Mawr, all the undergraduate students live on campus.  There are township laws about single females renting property that made it a mandate and now it’s just impossible to rent in that area as a college student.  The people in charge of freshmen room placement sent out a short personality survey to assist their decisions. On paper I can almost see how they thought a devout conservative Christian would get along with the upper middle class girl from Tennessee.

There are definite reasons we could have gotten along.  Unfortunately, in this timeline I didn’t know anything about who I am or how I would react to my unsupervised freedom.  I’m not sure which one of us it was harder on.  I know she wasn’t a mean person but the judgement was a little out of hand.  I’m not racist and that is a pretty terrible thing to label someone with.  Of course my choice of words in one particular conversation was very unfortunate.  All my lessons were learned the hard way back then.

I’m not sure what compelled me to attend Bryn Mawr College.  I had my heart set on going to school in New York City at first.  I applied to nearly 20 schools because I could.  I love options and will often go out of my way to secure them.  I had a lot of choices but none of the ones I really wanted.  I think I settled on an all women’s liberal arts college because ultimately that does represent me.  I didn’t finish my education there but it was an interesting way to start.  Fun fact, my graduating class admitted the first post-op trans woman as a student.  I think they are still only 3 all women’s colleges left, maybe less.

I had an option to attend Reed in Oregon and I often wonder how different my life might be if I’d experienced the west coast PGDB (pre-George Dubyah Bush).  The timing just wasn’t right back then.  I was more likely to hit Boston as my second choice, where I also might have done well.  The skewed shelter I constructed in a suburb of Philly was rife with gender identity issues that I drowned in sapio-sexuality.  I only dated boys that challenged me intellectually and then dominated them in the bedroom.  I still feared women for the most part but made a few female friends because at BMC sisterhood is far-reaching.  I don’t know any of them now.

I ended up leaving Bryn Mawr the same way I got there – on a whim.  During the second half of sophomore year my best friend hooked up with my on-again, off-again asshole of a boyfriend and that was the beginning of the end.  Over my second summer in Memphis I discovered the allure of being a Southern woman.  Because of my experiences with a black roommate in my first semester, my Southern heritage was challenged in a way I never identified with.  Being back home with people that have seen the world from my perspective was too comfortable to pass up.  Besides, I never could decide on a good major in a liberal arts curriculum.