How to Begin?

It's a dangerous business, Frodo my lad, stepping out your door. You step out onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you'll be swept off to... 


It's a hard thing to know how to start. A lot has changed since I wrote my last blog post about European Studies, not quite (??) two years ago. I guess a good place might be dealing with the fairly traumatic, truly bizarre thing that happened to me on May 16th, 2015.

Yep. I graduated from college.

why, you ask? A difficult question. Why anyone in their right mind would actually consider graduating from and then, quite abruptly, leaving college, is frankly beyond me. I guess if you don't leave then, you never would. And by the end I was a little ready. I was tired of class, my incredibly grueling routine, and the cutthroat pace of Rhodes. Graduating presented a confusing and difficult riddle of feelings.

On the morning of May 16th, I was a full-time college student. I had two part-time jobs. I lived in Memphis, TN, in my own house with two roommates that nearly always liked me. I had a number of dear friends within walking distance. I had a community, a church, classes, a very, very small income...

By the afternoon of May 16th, I had none of these things. I was a dead-beat twenty something, jobless, homeless, temporarily living in at home in Little Rock, preparing for a long walk in Spain that no one had ever heard of.

Sure, I'm going to a prestigious graduate school in London, England in approximately three and a half months... but most people look at me funny even when i talk about that.

Art history? they say. But why? Did you say... medieval art? They didn't make art in the Middle Ages! Life was a dark cesspool of garbage then, didn't you know? No one made any art. Better just stay home, Robyn. Be a dental hygienist.

To which I politely assure them that my future plans are legitimate, that the Courtauld Institute of Art is, in fact, a real place, and that I will be going there to study art made during what was, actually, a very rich and vibrant period of material culture.

But not yet.

What am I until then? I'm not a student right now. I'm not employed. I'm not married (ha). I don't really live anywhere. It puts me in an interesting limbo. For an entire summer, Robyn Barrow is a difficult quantity to categorize, in a way that I've never been before.

So I guess it's time to go on pilgrimage.