Flying Solo

When I was in eighth grade I wrote a story about a fictional grandmother who traveled the world. This (in the story, my) grandmother, two years widowed, used travel as a means to embrace life after the loss of her husband. I was constantly getting her exotic souvenirs in the mail--a piece of the Berlin Wall, ceremonial masks from Africa, prayer beads from Tibet. I illustrated the story with snapshots from her adventures--Grandma beside the Dalai Lama, waving enthusiastically at the camera; Grandma shading her eyes and beaming before the Leaning Tower of Pisa. My teacher (no spring chicken herself) loved it, and I loved creating her--she was eighty-something and absolutely alive, and I sent her off to places that I could only then dream about.

I've been thinking about that story a lot lately, which has everything to do with the fact that I'm about to travel solo for the first time. I love how--without realizing it, of course--at twelve years old, I fictionalized the woman that I one day hoped to be: bold, adventurous, resilient, and most of all, able to keep company with herself. It's funny and perhaps weirdly prescient that I wrote the grandma without a backpacking buddy. That kind of independence inspired me, yes, but seemed completely alien to me as well, being a) twelve and b) one half of a fertilized egg.

Thus, you see how, with a sister succumbing to love and marriage, that exploring life alone (no, not alone, alone sounds depressing--independently) is a fairly new endeavor for me. And while I admit that I often envy my sister's seamless transition of partners--twin to husband--it is a bit exhilirating, this learning to do life by myself. To be known as Jess, and not part of some package deal. And to figure out what on earth all that means.

I've imagined myself as a lot of different people by now. When I went away to a Christian college, I was going to become the most amazing Christian. I would lose my self-consciousness in worship and evolve past my spiritual A.D.D. I was also going to date a lot, because that's what you do at Christian college, and because my high school awkwardness had to be worth something. When I studied a semester in Italy, I was going to be popular. I was going to make lifelong friends easily and for once feel like I wasn't craning my neck towards the cool kids' lunch table. When I went to Rwanda I was going to become a tanned, earthy goddess. I would feel beautiful, at one with God and nature, and surround myself with laughing orphans.

Life is nothing if not ironic: as I write this now, from the messy room in which I grew up, I feel myself becoming more than I ever did with all those of changes of scenery. But of course, they all played their part too.

I can't explain it, but it is deeply satisfying to know, with so much still up in the air (beliefs, career, etc), that I am different. This limbo in which I find myself is proving quite formative, if not outwardly productive. Uncertainty disarms and recreates, perhaps more effectively than any backdrop change ever could.

It is quietly intoxicating, to feel yourself becoming who you are--even if it's not exactly any of the selves you once imagined. I'm just happy now to bear some resemblance to the old woman I invented when I was twelve.