July is the month when we say goodbye to writers who are retiring or moving on to new adventures, and this is Julia’s last post. She has been writing with us since November 2025.
On vacations, after dipping our toes into the ocean and rubbing the wet sand on our legs as God’s natural exfoliator, women whisper about how badly their hair will look once it’s dry. A worth-it side effect of spending time in the blue abyss. I know that my hair won’t look bad. In fact it will look the best it has since my last dip in the ocean.
Is it boring if the most interesting thing about me is that my hair looks great loaded with salt water? Nature’s elements do something good for naturally curly hair—something all the curl creams in my cabinet just can’t replicate.
How boring is it that I married the guy I started dating in 8th grade? I could tell you about the freckles on his skin and how they connect to create constellations only I can see, or the exact ways his face has changed over the years to become someone I recognize better than myself, but those would just be more boring stories.
My parents didn’t split, I’ve never been to jail, my grades were always decent, and my job trajectory has been steady. I don’t know what a spiritual awakening is because I only remember being awake. I do know a little bit about a political awakening, but I’ve started to realize the threads were always there. Boring stories stacked on top of each other like the people pyramids we did as a child. You’re only as strong as your foundation, or something like that, right?
What’s the rub? Well, everyone wants some sort of flashy testimony. The moment they hit rock bottom only to build themselves back up painstakingly, slowly, but stronger than ever before. What are the stories we can tell if we’ve never done that? What do we say if those stories aren’t ours to tell but rather things we witnessed that shaped us, our trajectory and the deepest understanding of ourselves? What if I’m not shaped by my own boring stories but rather the stories of those around me? What does that say about a person? That they are simply a sponge. Perhaps a sea sponge.
I think you become an observer very early in childhood. Observers tend to be well behaved because they observe what happens when you break the rules—or at least what happens when you get caught.
The hard part with observed stories is making them your own so you’re not a story stealer, stealing other people’s lives and trying them on just for fun. Using their trauma to your advantage so you can feel what it feels like to be traumatized. Nobody likes a trauma pretender. So you must simply observe, and, when you do re-tell it, change the details just enough so the people are unrecognizable and the events are foreign. For your own stories, stick to the boring ones that feel mundane. But tell them in a way that feels new.
Talk about the boy you’ve known since you were twelve. The steadiness makes it foreign, the years stacked on top of each other, the never breaking up, the only kissing one person your whole life, make you a freak. People love reading stories about freaks.
So you’ve never been to jail but talk about that time you probably should’ve. And your parents didn’t split, but there was that thing that happened, right?
Sea sponges feed off of the water that flows through them. They take from the water what they need, and they expel the rest. The entire ocean is theirs.
Julia is a 2018 graduate and studied English literature and business marketing during her time at Calvin. A Chicagoland native, she now resides in Grand Rapids, MI and works as a brand and marketing officer. She spends her free time reading fantasy novels, sweating in her gym’s sauna, renovating her almost 100-year-old house, and crafting according to her current creative fixation.
