After years of finding my identity in personal accomplishments, I realized that Jesus had a better life for me than one lived feeling to feeling, compliment to compliment, and award to award. He promises me – and all Christians – full life in him. As I learn to look upward, I wordsmith along the way.
I graduated from the University of Mississippi with an English degree and three minors, music, classics, and chemistry. My honors thesis concentrated on meaning and atheism in the novels of Ian McEwan. Despite being a typical overachiever (orchestra, small group leader, Ratio Christi president), my undergraduate career was a smorgasbord of vocational paths, and I graduated without knowing what I wanted to do. I moved to Greece for a year, where I taught middle school English on a Fulbright, drew a lot of portraits, and ate approximately 365 gyros.
I traveled to Wittenberg, Germany on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, and, a few months later, conceived of Looking Upward while literally looking upward at Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel.
I had planned to go to divinity school after my Fulbright year, but I couldn’t muster up the conviction or reasoning to actually go (or put myself in five-figure debt), so I decided to skirt the problem and apply to funded programs. In the meantime (and to avoid my parents’ forcing me to sell bedsheets at a local department store), I started taking on freelance writing work, which, despite my inability to talk on the phone like a normal human being, I managed to have a knack for.
I got into a funded graduate program, went to find an apartment, looked at 16, disliked them all, and decided I didn’t want to go to graduate school once and for all. In fact, the only thing in the whole world that I wanted to do was make good on Looking Upward, the little blog I’d started on a whim when I was in Greece.
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© Olivia Davis 2020, all rights reserved
