I Went to Wyoming to Get My MFA and It Gave My Life Back to Me

This is Why-oming, a column by Jenny Tinghui Zhang that explores life as a woman of color in Wyoming, one of the whitest and loneliest places in the United States.

*

Two years ago, on August 21, 2017, the moon covered the sun whole. All across America, people came out of their homes, schools, and office buildings. They looked up at the sky, hoping to see what the world would look like without the sun, if even for a second.

I was in Laramie, Wyoming, during what the media called the “Great American Eclipse.” Wyoming was one of fourteen states where you could have a chance at seeing totality—the moon would cover one hundred percent of the sun. That week, we heard horror stories of I-80 being backed up for miles by people who drove in from all over the country.

On the day of the eclipse, I went to Happy Jack, a recreation area ten minutes outside of town. Laramie had been my home for exactly five days. At Happy Jack, I clutched my mountain bike and waited for noon—peak eclipse time.

*

We are all killing ourselves with complacency. That was what I was thinking when I decided to go to grad school. Drunk, swaying at the club on yet another Friday night, I looked around at my friends and myself and all the strangers who also worked in tech startups. We’d congregate at the bars to get hammered, work week after work week. I wondered who the hell I had become.

How did I get here? It started with my English degree. In the months leading up to graduation, I heard the same thing over and over again: What are you going to do with an English degree? I had no earthly clue. All I ever wanted was to be a writer. After some failed service jobs and many underpaid internships, I found an editorial job at a tech startup that helped people find self-storage. There, I thought. That’s what I’m doing with my English degree. Something real.

Here comes the montage: I moved my way through the company until I became a copywriter, then the content marketing manager. I attended networking events and marketing conferences and took product marketing courses. I bought into this idea that maybe I could have a career in marketing. I believed in the low-hanging fruit, the bottom lines, the branding. God, the branding.

There were other things that came along with that, of course. For the first time in my life, I had a steady paycheck, benefits, a parking spot. I had security and a guarantee. I was hanging out with my coworkers regularly, staying after work to go to bars, and sleeping very little. I hadn’t opened up Microsoft Word in months.

The thing about living in Austin, Texas—a city that calls itself hip and has become an overflow of affluent twenty and thirty-something entrepreneurs, technies, and “visionaries”—is that it’s easy to get comfortable here. It’s way too convenient to plan your life around work, brunch, happy hours, going out, and eating at the hottest new fusion tapas restaurant. It became a different kind of hamster wheel—at least for me. I was so happy to have a salary, health insurance, stability. I was so happy that I allowed myself to become comfortable, and in becoming comfortable, I also forgot about the person I wanted to be: a writer.

When I finally took the plunge and left my job, my friends, and my partner for grad school in Wyoming, I was five years deep in a nine-hour-day tech job that stifled me with meetings, jargon, and colleagues who did not care about the same things I cared about. I wasn’t writing; I wasn’t reading; I wasn’t doing any of the things that would get me closer to my dreams. Instead, I was merely working for the weekend.

Today, you’ll write, I kept telling myself. But there was nothing there. The only thing I could feel was the dread of waking up on Monday and doing it all over again. I found myself wondering: Can you lose it? This thing called creativity, this thing I thought I was born with all along. Can it just die?

Which was why I chose to go to grad school in Wyoming, of all places. With nothing but mountains, nine-month-long winters, and land, the state didn’t offer much in terms of distraction. In fact, one of the graduates told me, it would be hard to do anything but write here. Wyoming would be a reset, a chance to return to the person I wanted to be and fully submerge myself in the thing I loved most: writing. New friends, new peers, new colleagues. No one would ever talk about low-hanging fruit again.

*

My first month was hard. I found beetles stuck to the walls of my basement apartment and centipedes wiggling across the kitchen tile every morning. I hated hearing the laughter and footsteps of my upstairs neighbors, who, with every dinner or movie night, underscored how alone I was.

I fought with my partner more than I wanted, both of us finding long-distance difficult and unsatisfying. I was cold all the time. I couldn’t climb three flights of stairs without doubling over and panting due to the 7,200-feet altitude.

This kind of story is not unique. Go to a new place, experience adversity while trying to settle in. Add the fact that I was in a highly conservative, homogenous state with a history of anti-Chinese violence and homophobic hate crimes. I cried more in Wyoming than I can recall crying since I was a kid.

Wyoming would be a reset, a chance to return to the person I wanted to be and fully submerge myself in the thing I loved most: writing.

But. I was writing. I was reading. I was with a cohort of folks who loved to do the same things. In workshop, when someone had trouble with a story they were writing, the others came ready with a long list of books and authors that might offer a way out. At Coal Creek Tap, the local brewery, my classmates and I wrote next to each other, the sound of our keyboards a gentle sizzle. At night, burrowed under blankets as the February wind raged at our doors, we spammed our group text admiring how good the writing in The Good Place was. And when it got too hard, we danced it out, in the living room of Anne Grass’s house, five of us, sometimes six, each expressing with our bodies the way Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” could become a religion, something of a symphony.

And I understood: This is what community feels like.

I could tell you about the mountains that looked like kings. I could tell you how when you stared at the snow, it stared right back—into you, like it could pierce you and splinter you into a million different pieces with its whiteness. I could tell you how the sidewalks glittered at night and steamed with smoke during the day. About that time my friend went hiking and saw a bear. About that time my class got lost somewhere in between Wyoming and Colorado, chasing an obscure reference from James Galvin’s “The Meadow.”

I could tell you about the wild horse farms, the one-hundred-person town of Centennial, visiting Joy Williams in her cabin, the karaoke bars, joining a flag football team, Matthew Shepard. My undergraduate students who were both so fierce and terrified in their convictions. Seeing Black Panther in a non-sold-out movie theater. The underground drag community. Cowboys. Driving all the way to Fort Collins just to eat Indian food. The delicate balance between control and giving in to fate the moment you realize you’ve stepped on black ice.

I became curious, cowed by the land, asking myself to experience it all. In doing so, I thrived. I thrived in the knowledge that even in sad and lonely and terrible moments, there was a singular joy: I had chosen this. I was letting myself live on my own terms again.

What did Wyoming give me? I think it’s more a question of what it took. (And I don’t mean the layers of moisture the cold stripped from my face every time I stepped outside.) It took away the numbness, blew it clean off. Not even a warning. You want to feel something again, it asked. Feel this: barren open plains, ghoulish wind, interminable snow, miles and miles of nowhere. Feel the way your lungs clutch for air anytime you exert yourself, how your throat wants to collapse after jogging for five minutes, the sheer effort it takes to simply go outside. Feel what it feels like to be in the world, really be in it.

Once, driving back from Breckenridge, I drove straight into a snowstorm. Somewhere on a service road in Wyoming, I started fishtailing, the back of my car swerving and careening out wildly. It suddenly felt as though I wasn’t in my body anymore, but watching it happen to someone else—the car dancing across the road, my elbows flapping out as I tried to turn, the sound of the snow crunching under the tires. Then I remembered the thing that everyone had told me when I asked: Don’t fight it, go with it, go with it.

They closed that road down just as I was turning onto a much drier interstate. I was the last person to access it before they blocked it off. As I drove away, I almost laughed: a younger me would have kept trying to fight it, would have turned and turned and turned until she was upside down in her overturned car, stuck on the side of the road somewhere, wondering how anyone was going to find her in the middle of this snowstorm.

What did Wyoming teach me? How to survive. You have to be paying attention, whether it’s to the road when it’s sleeting, to the spot you’re about to step in, to the way people look at you. You have to be paying attention, because that’s how you find what you’re looking for.

I was looking for myself. I think I found her.

*

It was raining the day I left Wyoming.

I envisioned a grand, meaningful goodbye to the place where I lived for two years. In the months and weeks leading up to my move-out date, I planned to go for one last mountain bike at Happy Jack, climb the rocks at Vedauwoo, and take a trek to the summit of Medicine Bow. I would visit my favorite bars, eat one last meal at Sweet Melissa’s, maybe finally try the only ice cream parlor in town, which always seemed to close early whenever I wanted ice cream.

None of this ever happened. Happy Jack was too slushy for biking. The road out to Medicine Bow was still crusted with ice. Between packing, selling my furniture, defending my thesis, and tying up all my loose ends, I didn’t have time to do any of my goodbyes to Laramie. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I kept thinking. Until tomorrow was today and there were no more days after that.

The final days leading up to my move-out from my apartment were marked with bad luck. I fell down the stairs while moving and sprained my ankle. I got a parking ticket on campus, having paid for the wrong parking meter. On the last day, I locked myself out of my apartment with my purse still inside and had to wait for the locksmith to come, an eighty-five-dollar mistake.

It was as if Wyoming was trying to put an exit tax on my soul before letting me leave.

You have to be paying attention, because that’s how you find what you’re looking for.

When it was finally said and done, when I could no longer see out the back of my Subaru, I drove out of Laramie more than happy to leave. There was no sense of nostalgia, no sadness in leaving. The days leading up to this moment had been so filled with stress and strife that I couldn’t wait for it all to end. Just before hitting the outskirts of town, I stopped at the Carriage House, a historical building where generations of MFA students have had writing workshops. I snapped a picture. Then I left.

It was that easy. I got on I-80 and drove south, past Happy Jack, Vedauwoo, the tree in the middle of the interstate, Buford, and Cheyenne, on a route I was so used to by now. When I reached the Wyoming-Colorado state line, the clouds instantly cleared, and the rain stopped.

*

In Laramie, we only got to ninety-seven percent totality for the eclipse. It was amazing, I thought, that even at ninety-seven percent, the world could still be so bright.

During the eclipse, my surroundings turned a strange, faded ochre. It looked post-apocalyptic. Birds sat on the fence posts, their little black bodies like pikes. It reminded me of when you were in school and the lights dimmed ever so slightly before going bright again, and how weird and discomforting that felt to the body. Around me, other cars cried out with jubilation and awe.

And then it was over.

The people next to me took off their eclipse glasses. “That was it?” one of them huffed. “Did you get any pictures of it?”

Her friend shook his head, examining his phone. “None of them turned out.”

They got back in their car and drove away. I took my mountain bike to the head of the trail and started my ride. I thought about how the next eclipse won’t be until 2150, how this was probably the first and last time something like this would happen to me. In fact, I didn’t even remember it happened until I started writing this essay.

*

My cohort responded differently to Wyoming. Some wanted to sever ties completely, never come back again. Others will get married there. Back in Austin, I contemplate who I am in relation to Wyoming. Since coming back, I’ve been frequently asked about how I’m doing. “What’s it like being back?” “How are you finding the transition between Wyoming and Austin?” “Is it weird returning to the real world?”

I don’t really know how to answer that question. My immediate response is to joke it off. Yes, I missed the food, access to entertainment and amenities, everyone’s favorite Texan grocery store chain H-E-B. By doing this, I guess it’s easier than telling them the truth.

Which is this: I feel like I should feel something, but I don’t. Wyoming was a seminal chapter in my life, one where I rediscovered my path. Shouldn’t I feel the most right now, having left it behind? Grief, sadness, mourning. The feeling of leaving something and knowing you will not come back. But try as I might, there’s nothing there to feel.

I used to go to a lot of concerts when I was younger. And I wanted to remember everything—the atmosphere, the facial expressions of the band or artist on stage, how the concert made me feel, second by second. What I found, though, was that I could never remember anything in the way that I wanted. BTS had fireworks; I remember being overjoyed, but I can’t remember what that joy felt like. Carly Rae Jepsen made me cry, but I can’t remember how I became so overwhelmed. Robyn was wearing yellow platform sneakers and I can’t remember anything else.

These moments of great significance—a concert, or an eclipse, or living in near-isolation for two years—are not dissimilar. You experience it; you go through it; you come out on the other side. Every time I try to mourn the loss of Wyoming and my time there, I stop. Because now, at least, I know I haven’t lost anything. I found the person I wanted to be, and I took her with me. You find a way to move on, knowing that for a moment, you got everything you needed and that was enough.

Back in Austin, I am realizing that it is not so difficult, after all, to be the person I want to be. She is someone who knows how to say no to things. She is someone who will not go back into the tech startup bubble. She is someone who will prioritize her mental health.

She is someone who writes.

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