A past life
This summer, in an incredible twist of fate, I met myself and damn I’m really cool. No, like for real, for the first time ever I can honestly say that I like myself. There’s a caveat though, I only like me when I’m actually being me.
For the longest time I’ve been a servant. I’ve dished out parts of myself that I felt people wanted, or, I tried to highlight insecurities in an attempt to feel validated.
An external pressure led me to try to achieve goals that were not of my own making. This pressure had me feeling incredibly incapable, off-path, and unworthy. A transformational thought fell into my mind one day recently, and I let it sit there and knew that a time of change was a-coming.
The catalyst that pushed that thought to action is still unknown, but whatever made that it explode like baking soda and vinegar was such an incredible blessing. I bit the bullet and doled out some of my writing to a workshop and felt understood as an artist for the first time since I left school. Actually, no, I felt like an artist at all for the first time since I left school.
While I was there, I walked the streets of New Haven, may or may not have had a spiritual moment with a tree, and then felt certain that I was capable of doing it. I was capable of being a writer, of serving no one but myself.
It took a while to fully apply that realization to my life, but a few days of putting in hoop earrings I felt like I was ready to be the girl others have seen but I had yet to meet.
Slowly, the version of my life I had worked so hard to curate into what I believed everyone expected and wanted for me became what felt like a past life. Expectations and details of a past life sloughed off my shoulders and my eyes looked bluer.
Maggie Rogers entered my life somewhere in this period of time, and man oh man she was important. I mean she became so important to me, a girl who panics in a crowded elevator, that I went to Lollapalooza to see her and then danced in a giant mass of people.
During her set, the freeness of my dancing reminded me that I had finally done it – I grew up and became who I wanted to be not who I thought others wanted me to be.
In the midst of the grooviness she cast upon Grant Park, I remembered that I had just given my notice at my job as a journalist, I consistently opened my laptop to a manuscript that is actually taking the form of a book, started laughing when I feel like laughing, I started to kiss who I wanted to kiss, and I danced the way I wanted to dance.
In this current life, I finally, as Maggie Rogers said best, “learned to talk and say whatever I wanted to.”
