My Sewanee Experience: In Form of Scattered Diary Entries

Monday, August 10, 2026

My first time at Stirling’s Coffee. It is smaller than I expected given how much I have heard about it, but I see why it is so loved. It’s beautiful. Very scenic, it captures the essence of Sewanee. Small but so scenic, so human, so green, so alone in its beauty yet felt deeply by those trying to escape loneliness while still embracing the solitude that life has wrapped around them.

I ate my akara and garri. I couldn’t finish the akara, but the whole eating experience wasn’t bad at all.

Then I started to do the reimbursement thing and then I started with Carlile You without Me. I realized that this was a song I want to use to anchor my birthday message for my 30th. Something about me and my mom, something about how she must feeling the you without me feeling that Brandi is feeling about her child(ren).

I then went on to NPR Brandi and I have heard this song before – Human- but it played again. And Good God, I lost my fucking mind. I lost my fucking mind.

I am crying in an open space, in God’s blest beloved Stirling’s. The song is doing things to me. Good Lord Jesus. This is the part 2 of what I know I will anchor my birthday message on. But it’s more the message, it’s more than trying to find new strength as I walk into my 30th year. It’s more than reckoning with the fear, with the gratitude and the burden that comes with it. It’s more than all that. It’s just that it describes everything I have been wrestling with this whole year, this whole year. Good God, the song.

Brandi breaks down the process of writing it here.

There is a lot I want to say. How the song, Human, somehow melded into the ecstatic, freeing feeling I have been having all morning due to the courage I took to go out and let myself live outside my room. The beauty of Stirling, the calmness, the chaos, the seeing other people live their lives other than the two lovely girlies I have been cooped up with these past days, the excitement on people’s faces, the stillness, the conversations, the hopes I wore on my sleeve when I pulled out my yellow blouse and paired it with a blue jean, all of that and more, made Carlile’s Human resonate in ways that it didn’t when I first listened to it then. I remember loving it then, but no, I didn’t cry in silence, I didn’t rethink my entire life in gratitude and trembling like I did today. The person maketh the environment just as the environment maketh the person.

Oh wait, also went to the library to collect my laptop (I get a brand new Mac laptop – surprised look) and they had this whole thing in the library that I found cute.

Me looking fly today. I hope I stay in this good mood for a long while.

Thursday, August 13, 2026

During a casual conversation today, my friend, Ivy Borden, asked me the all too familiar question: “How are you doing settling into your new place?” I was just going to say fine, but something in that moment clicked and I finally have the words for these past days.

“Hmmm. I can’t say it has been all blissful. I find that I am feeling the stranger effect every now and then. Things are different here. Quieter, more quarantine-like, more naturely. It’s a good thing if I can probably challenge that into positive actions. But I have not been cultivating as healthy a routine as I could around this new environment. I could wake up, go for a long nature walk, go to the cafe and office, etc. But I am mostly on my laptop and phone, sleeping in, waiting for the next disaster to happen (so far, it has been a crisis, financial strain, and now it is Harold my car. He is misbehaving). This place is both limiting in the sense that I can’t move around without a car, I don’t know a lot of people or have a lot of help and freeing in the sense that I can detach from my past harried self and build myself in ways I couldn’t as a student; but it all depends on one’s approach to living. So far, I have not necessarily embraced the goodnesses of being here. I am not harnessing its possibilities. I keep telling myself it takes time to immerse yourself into beauty, to be beautiful in a beautiful place. But I want to start the process already. That’s a long ass answer. But I think I needed to purge.”

By the way, my car Harold broke down and has now left in a financial pinch. On the good side, I finally got my friend’s book, Araluebo by Kanyinsola Olorunnisola. I have skimmed through and it is brilliant. I definitely am including that somewhere in my syllabus.