I was an Associate Dean of Admission at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY from 1986-1988. It was an incredible job with some of the loveliest colleagues I’ve worked with in forty plus years.

I lived (in a rented lake house) and worked with two of my best friends. You couldn’t find three people more different, but it worked, much to our delight.

Colgate is a fancy liberal arts college located in Hamilton, NY, an hour east of Syracuse. As is common, about half of our admissions team were alumni. The other half of us had graduated from similar small, liberal arts colleges.

What made our team unique was our backgrounds. Unlike many of those we recruited, we were first- and second-generation college grads from working- and middle-class backgrounds who had reveled and thrived in our own college experiences.

Post graduation, a job in Admissions was an obvious choice for us before we headed to graduate school or a new career. Heck, if you’ve tasted the banana-split of higher education, you want everyone to have a spoon.

After two years, we three housemates went our separate ways. Lee began a career teaching high school Classics. Marianne went to grad school in Philosophy, becoming a professor at my alma mater, Hamilton College, twenty miles east of Colgate.

I stayed at Colgate, got my teaching degree and worked as a graduate assistant to the University Church, which meant I got to do some preaching as I had in college.

Sometime in that year the intrusive thoughts began. Thoughts that I’m being mutilated by an unseen hand.

As you can imagine, everything changed when they started. The thoughts would go on for hours, days, weeks at a time.

I was terrified.

I lost most of my friends — it’s too hard to listen to someone else’s suffering, and it was all I could talk about.

I was teaching middle school social studies and trying not to fall apart seven days a week.

It’s no surprise that my memories of my two years in the Colgate Admissions Office are extra idyllic in retrospect. They were the last two years before things got weird.

Thirty-five years later I still get the thoughts multiple days a week, like somebody’s misplaced slasher script has fallen into my brain and can’t find a way out.

Thirty-five years later, I’ve also created a life I love. One that mirrors the joys of Colgate. Deep friendships. Long conversations. Playful interactions. Delight in the outdoors. A sense of belonging and curious anticipation of what’s still to come.