I was beginning to pack up for the big move back home for the summer, and was digging through old boxes in my room that I actually hadn't unpacked since I moved them to storage at the end of last year. In one of the boxes, amidst computer manuals and mysteriously homeless bolts, I found a framed picture of myself from my sophomore year of high school.
I just want to point out my jean jacket that I lost a little while after this photo was taken. I really really loved that jacket, and still mourn not being able to cuff the sleeves, paint my fingernails lime green, and feel as though the 90s never surrendered to the Y2k hype.
Now, bad hair jokes aside, I couldn't help but ask the girl in the picture, "So, is this what you imagined?"
Not that at fifteen I wasn't enraptured with the idea of leaving the state forever no matter where I went, but I still remember the dreams of that girl in the photo. I was going to Georgetown University, and I was going to become a diplomat for the United Nations, and I was going to kick ass and take names. In a diplomatic way, of course.
Now, the kicking ass and taking names is still on my agenda. But never in my wildest dreams did I think I would end up here, in a small town, at a very small school, studying theology and working full time at Greenpeace for the summer.
I do feel some sense of responsibility to the fifteen year old in the picture. Did I do enough to make her dreams come true? Or did I fall into complacency? Will I see a picture of me at twenty when I am twenty-five and feel like I have to apologize to her?
I have a habit I started a while ago of having a picture of me as a little girl as my desk top background, or in my wallet, at all times. Because when I look at me when I was two years old with a pirate hat covering my curly wisps of hair and toothless smile, I feel much more responsible for that little girl than when I look at the little girl staring out from twenty year old eyes in the mirror.
Now I sit among boxes packed with wrinkled books, Costco-sized detergent containers, winter sweaters, and I wonder; what do I owe myself?
Here's a new goal;
In five years, when I look at a picture of me as a twenty year old and oblivious to the times ahead, I'll feel like I want to thank myself, and maybe take me out for a drink to celebrate the next blind, but confident, steps.
6 comments:
I find myself meditating on the aspirations of my past lives more and more lately, occasionally from discontent but more frequently from a desire to understand why i make the decisions i do.
I'm pretty sure I didn't begin my educational track with any intention of even temporarily returning to the tiny town in which I grew up. On the other hand I don't think I ever intended to return to Montana period.
I do recognize now though that a good part of that initial experience of being here is what drew me, not without a hefty dose of irony, to follow bigger concerns (generally things more
important than well, me) with more honest consideration. -The lofty goal being to "save the world" as it were, and find some sense of justice in it.
I continually have a hard time being content with where I am or where I'm headed, and whether anything i'm doing is even remotely connected to the radical attitude i began to adopt in college. I do have to consider once in a while that it's the choices I have been hesitant or even regretful about that have turned the corner toward what I want - or have at very least enlightened me toward what's worth experiencing.
I think my younger self wouldn't be so dissapointed with who I am, he might just be confused as to how I got here.
Greenpeace?
http://how2dostuff.blogspot.com/2006/02/how-to-make-secret-hollow-book.html
Sneaky book.
Bam.
I would suggest maybe keeping one of your textbooks to make into a sneaky book. No one is going to pick up/rifle through them.
Hmmm...I'll just go for the first lyric that came to my head.
But there's still tomorrow
Forget the sorrow
And I can be on the last train home
Watch it pass the day
As it fades away
No more time to care
No more time, today
Ugh, ok my mind has more than that. Life is a giant pillow, stuffed with the good, laced with the bad (everyone hates the lace edges of decorative pillows, or may be that's just me?) and still we cuddle up with it and remember that no matter how badly it seems to have gone it's still comfy.
You promised yourself a lot, and you will continue to. When will you realize that that girl in the picture, the one smiling back at you with unsuspecting eyes? Yes, her. She is the same girl as the toothless little child, and the same one as the girl staring back at you accusingly from the inside of your mirror. She is there. It is her. You are her! And you didn't let her down...you lived your life. You've learned to love more passionately and deeply than you could ever ask for. You know what it's like to run away, and to stay and fight. To take a chance and have your heart broken. To trust. Don't you dare blame yourself for that. Don't you dare beat yourself up for that. Life doesn't turn out the way you want it sometimes, and that's ok. Because its just a chapter of a bigger story...and this chapter will make or break it.
yes, it is quite a "weird whirl wind"
I do the same thing with my childhood photos.
Stick to that goal, I'm sure it won't let you down. :]
Post a Comment