Micah Powch on music, machinery, and madness | Humans of Catlin Gabel

By Alexandria Nagy, ‘22

Images by Micah Powch

Micah Powch is an iconic Junior at the Catlin Gabel School (CGS). His amiable personality allows for him to connect with a spectrum of students and teachers who view his charisma and creativity with endearment, but what really goes on inside his head? 

“I’ll introduce myself. I’m Micah, I am a mess most of the time, and I like to code. I like being outdoors, but I also like being with people, especially with people outdoors… My deal is that I like being active and a part of nature. I’m fun, accepting, caring, and deeply social, but I also really have a knack for coding. 

“One of my friends here at Catlin once described me in the Robotics lab as the most unawkward and most awkward person in the entire grade. I’d say that’s pretty accurate,” Micah said, punctuating his words with his fist on the table.

“If someone wrote a biography about me, the title would have to be, ‘shocking: kid who has never done drugs has 5% crack in blood.’ Make that the title of your article. I have a rare condition that my body creates methamphetamines; that’s why I’m such a weirdo,” he joked. 

Micah grapples with complex dichotomies in his personality. First, he feels that his interests in being social and coding are at odds with each other.

“I have struggled to find a balance. I don’t want to spend my life behind a computer screen, but I feel like I’ve done my best work behind a computer screen. I also really like writing music.”

Second, he wrestles with his outgoingness and social anxiety.

“I’m quiet, and I don’t like people to notice me,” Micah jokingly described himself. “Honestly though, attention is very anxiety-inducing. That’s very interesting to you probably because I feel like I’m a very grand person.

A typical day in Micah’s life is chaotic, introspective, and musical.

“I wake up. I stand up, blood drains from my head, blackout, wake up again, consider playing a Taylor Swift song to hype me up for the day, and realize playing that song will make me rely on music to feel happiness, and then I won't be able to be my normal self waking up. I want to be present, so I don’t listen to the song. I get ready, scramble to get to my carpool on time, and then carpool to school. Then, I listen to the Taylor Swift song. Then I get to school.”

“There are healthy ways to wind down after I get home, and there are unhealthy ways. Often, I get caught up in code too much. More recently, I have been working on this project….”

During our interview, Eli Foster, a senior at CGS, left his Learning Center room and stumbled into the conversation. He gave Micah a beat, and they started rapping together.

On the subject of musical performance, music plays a significant role in Micah’s life. 

“I love music. Music means everything to me. Music is how I cope with the horrible mish-mash of emotions I am constantly feeling and the anxieties. I think music is way more than just listening to sounds. It is finding stuff that you feel represents where you are emotionally, and, for me at least, that can amplify things or make me get in my head about things. Sometimes I feel like I need to listen to a song, and then in hindsight, I realize that was actually really bad because that made me just indulge in this kind of dependency that is bad for me in the long term.

“The first artist that I really got into was the Fat Rat. My first year of listening to music online was all just EDM because my Kung Fu teacher played the Fat Rat, Galantis, and Arctic Monkeys. Right now, I'm really into Rex Orange County. He’s just so talented; he incorporates strings into his music so well.

“I got really into Pluto Projector [a song by Rex Orange County] a year or two ago at a friend's house when I was blowing up on Scratch, the coding website. I coded in JavaScript, projects that interfaced with the API and basically made normal Scratch projects to do crazy things like getting a Google search or getting your profile picture and displaying it to you. A bunch of people liked it. I got a little popular from that, so I indulged in it and stayed up really late coding projects. I listened to Pluto Projector so many times those nights.”

“I could talk about my favorite artists for so long. A lot of it is rock, but there's such an array from Green Day to Taylor Swift, AJR, OK Orchestra, Neo Theater, the Fat Rat. Certain chord changes or strings in music just send me. This song by Reliant K called This Week the Trend has this part that sounds like you’re ascending to heaven. It’s so wonderful.”

He played This Week the Trend for me. It really was wonderful.

“Dorothy. Miranda. Clarke. I am seeing a Dodie concert; you are all invited. It's on March 21st, and I'm so hype! Dodie’s music got me through quarantine. Without it, I probably would have moved to Indonesia to become a Poekoelan Tjimindie Tulen master.”

Micah elaborated on the relationships in his life with family, friends, potential love interests, and some of the personal setbacks he experiences with maintaining them.

“I have an amazing relationship with my mom; she’s an awesome independent woman. I had a donor dad. I don’t feel bad about it, but I think that not having a dad in my life and not having a parental relationship to look up to has affected me. I worry that it has made me stunted in some way.”

“I haven’t been in a romantic relationship yet. I think I get too attached to people without being able to tell them I have feelings. It seems easy to confess to someone, but in practice, it's so weird and unfamiliar to me.”

“I have so much conversational anxiety. In terms of my overthinking things, I'm just always worrying that I’m horrible at talking, horrible at being vulnerable, horrible at being open and listening to people. That worry itself can make me listen less and be more distracted. I just worry that I don't have enough deep friendships or that I’m horrible at telling stories, or that I have some mental deficiency that makes me unable to track conversations.”

Micah is happiest when he can foster new friendships or build more profound connections with other people. Still, these moments do not subvert his internal struggles with social anxiety and personal altruism.

“I’d say the happiest moments of my life are the times when I feel like I've genuinely connected or reconnected with a friend. I’ve had some recent moments where I feel very happy but undertoned with anxiety and the feeling that I’m not exactly myself. I made an awesome friend this year at German summer camp. We instantly connected, and it was really nice having that close of a friend.”

“Another highlighted moment would have to be Hamilton tea parties. We’d go to my friend Lexy’s house. Me, Lexy, Dylan, and sometimes Dylan’s partner Geo. We would listen to Hamilton, drink tea, raise a glass to freedom, and feel classy sitting down, going around Hood River, [and] exploring dark, deserted streets.”

I inquired about Micah’s deepest secret, to which he responded:

“I wear my heart on my sleeve, and I think most things that are secrets need to be worked through.”

Then, I asked Micah the question we were all wondering about; what is going on inside his head?

“Gerbils, just tons of gerbils.”

Then I inquired what the gerbils were doing.
“Gerbil acrobatics; a gymnastic reenactment of that one scene from Jurassic Park,” Micah explained, mimicking gerbil noises. 

I supplied the clarifying question, “the one where the kid gets eaten?”

“That's the one. Actually, I have no clue what you’re talking about. I don’t think any of the kids got eaten,” Micah responded.

It is unclear which scene he was referring to.

Micah’s hair journey and shower routine are some things that simply cannot be overlooked. He warns about the dangers of hair monsters and communicates the fruits of maintaining his luscious curls.

“I take my time in the shower. I make sure all the littlest microorganisms in my hair go for a ride. I take really long showers, and I can wash my hair at the very end. I let the water run down my head until everything's fully wet. I let myself just breathe, just be, and enjoy this sacred time free of stress and anxieties… My hair is the curliest when I let it air dry.”

“But make sure you brush it out while it’s wet,” Micah warned. “I had some very bad experiences when I had my long hair. A creature started growing--a hair creature. It was a knot of hair that I had to get cut out. I saved it in a plastic bag. It’s humongous. I don't know where the plastic bag went, and I’m kind of scared because it may have grown sentient and walked away.”

Lastly, Micah holds wishes for himself and others.

“I want to get to a spot where I feel confident. I think it’s hard for people to realize most people feel shaken to the bone right now. Here’s a message to all of you out there listening, and Alexandria, don’t write this as if I said, ‘you know kids? When I was your age, it was really hard. It will be alright; things will get better. Now Micah is a professional bicyclist who does the bicycle on balance beams. Micah is a balance beam bicycle boy now who will bash your brains in with knowledge.’”

“Here’s my message, you need to let go because you guys actually suck. And the voices in your head? Yeah, they’re telling the truth,” he joked.

“But really, as the years go by, as you form who you are--and that takes a long time--who you will be in a year might be barely recognizable from today. This moment will be in the past, and it won’t ever come back again, for better or for worse. You are, deep down, wonderful.”