Abstract
At the quarter-life crossroads of young adulthood, a Midwest transplant living in Idaho explores routine, religion, and popular media in search of a sense of self. This nonfiction thesis is a collection of stories from my life that uses life study and archival methods. Worth Holding opens with a tour of the narrator's home and many objects that decorate the rooms. Memories are excavated into rooms and collections of objects. The narrator meanders through these excavation sites attempting to retrace the ways they’ve determined who they are. This thesis is deeply entrenched in scales of and opportunities for observation: hearing and smelling Mom and Dad baking, watching and rewatching favorite TV shows and movies, and feeling the reverberations of grief across an extended family. The essays in Worth Holding serve as galleries of the past selves, inviting the reader to meander through the last twenty-five years of the narrator’s life. Together these galleries present an exhibition of the narrator at the time of the writing, at the outset of life as an adult. This project is deeply concerned with contained and determined spaces, but this concern does not limit the narrator or reader, instead serving as the connective fiber between memories; past and future become a continuously experienced present where my questions of how, why, and who sprout from the ground like mushrooms.