When I was 12, I wanted to be popular. Gaggles of friends and having my name on everyone's lips, for whatever reason, is something that I thought appealed to me, even though I was shy and more acquainted with books than reality. I don't know why the idea of prestige has such a seductive power at any age, that even as a bookish child, I knew what Oscar Wilde meant when he wrote that the only thing worse than being talked about was "not being talked about." But in the years since then, I have learned that in this life you get to choose whether you are going to love people deep or only wide. You choose whether you are going to love them even after seeing the parts that are less shiny and polished, the parts that are more in need of forgiveness. And you choose whether you are going to let them love you into those dark crevices of your own self. In the end, I chose friendship. Or rather, it chose me. Thank goodness that it did.
When I was 15, I wanted to be beautiful. I spent lazy hours thumbing through magazines full of re-touched bodies that didn't look anything like mine. Grappling with that toxic notion, in a mind not even fully formed, that to be beautiful by this impossible standard was to be happy, was to be worth something in this world. Every girl I have ever met has had this experience in one form or another, had some voice, often many voices, telling her that she is not thin enough or feminine enough or pretty enough. But where are the voices telling us that this belief, perpetuated implicitly, ubiquitously and inescapably in every form of media, is a lie of the worst kind? Those voices are fewer and difficult to make out above the din. I would continue to carry those magazine-page ideals with me until, years later, I would have a sort of revelation. Strolling through a Tuscan villa, I was shocked to recognize myself in a 16th century fresco. She represented a different ideal from a different moment in human history. The resemblance was uncanny, all curves and softness right up to her luscious chocolate curls. How lucky she was, I thought, to be living in a an age where she was considered beautiful. How lucky I am, I thought, to be living in an age with Feminism and antibiotics.
When I was 18, I wanted to be smart. I sought answers to all the questions, determined that, as a newly-initiated adult, nothing could stand between me and the universe's intimate secrets. With that universal hubris of youth, I was certain that the answers to the world's problems and the questions of our time, though they eluded so many other great minds, were somehow easily within my own reach. But I discovered quickly and definitively that the more I learned, the less I could know for sure. I learned that answers are rarely satisfying if they don't lead immediately to more questions. I learned that darkness and light rarely exist without being infernally tangled together. And I came to understand that eternal scene of Eve in the garden, tasting the fruits of Knowledge for the first time. How every taste after the first one would be both bitter and sweet. And yet, it never made me want to stop learning, to stop doubting and prodding and questioning. Ultimately, the pursuit of Knowledge was not made any less worthwhile by the unlikeliness of ever truly attaining it.
When I was 21, I wanted to be loved. I was chasing after a feeling that I had read about in books and seen in movies, seeking to play a part that had been ingrained in me since childhood, all flushed cheeks and beating heart and whispered confidences. But I found love to be most often unrequited and found myself left fraught with insecurities as a memento of everything I was not. But I learned to grow out of those supposed inadequacies, or rather, I grew into them. I forgave myself for being deeply flawed and for being deeply human (perhaps the same thing). More than anything, I learned to love myself.
When I was 23, I wanted more than anything to belong to a place and for that place to belong to me. Speaking foreign words in a foreign city everyday made me feel alive and lonely and full and empty all at the same time. I experienced the richness and the joy and the confusion and the sadness of a perpetual identity crisis, of being two things at once, of being everything, of being nothing, of being always caught in the middle. I left little pieces of myself everywhere in Florence, in gardens and in vineyards and in restaurants and on rooftops and mostly in the hearts of the beautiful people I met there. Perhaps that's the price of loving a place so dearly, to be left fractured, to never be completely at home anywhere again. Honestly, I wouldn't have it another way.
So where does that leave me now at 25? I guess what I'm searching for now more than anything is to feel a part of something bigger than myself. To have a mission and to build something that will still be here after I'm gone. Perhaps, in its own way, that's what I have been searching for all along. Perhaps that's what we're all searching for: belonging and purpose. If my past experience is any indication, the future will continue unfolding with little concern for my plans or desires. I'm sure that a few long-sought paths will probably lead to dead ends, but equally sure that beauty will reveal itself in unexpected places along the way.
