At the age of twenty-one, I have acquired enough familiarity with the “big picture” to understand that in my senior year of college I am standing in a unique position. Here I am, a new and freshly molded mind about to be thrown out into the “real world” of work and loan payments, like a toddler stripped of her water wings and tossed into a pool. I understand that my next movements and actions, whether I panic and splutter or float on top of the roiling water, will define my adulthood. Am I ready? Have I learned enough? What will I do? People who love me stand close, holding their breath, waiting to see if I need rescuing.
Well, grandparents and loved ones, you can feel comfortable backing away now. I have listened to Socrates' advice and have examined my life. I was born into this strange world a fat little baby with huge blue eyes and white-blond hair (actually, a little angelic if I do say so myself). Looking at pictures of my baby self, I see my big, new eyes opening wide to drink up the world around me, trying to see and learn and know everything and meet everyone. I grew up, that same curiosity still coursing through my mind, but I grew up caged by circumstance. Gloriously foreign sounds and images filtered in, taunting me, and I have spent much of my life with eye and ear pressed hard against the pinhole of my mid-western, low-income, broken-family existence wondering, what's out there? For a long time, my passion for the world around me was stifled by the weight of knowledge I acquired too soon and too quickly: that people are liars, that promises are more often than not broken, that love is conditional, that when my family falls apart again I am the one that must stand up and try to piece us back together because (as my grandparents are fond of telling me) I am the only one with my head screwed on straight; that the world I had once so desperately wanted to meet is mostly full of anguish, injustice, and hollow dreams for lives that may not, on occasion, be worth living. I housed this sage disappointment in my young soul for years, and it ate away at me until all I could do was try to close my eyes and mind as often as possible to escape for one brief, precious moment. And while I had my eyes closed, my mother got pregnant.
My brother was born when I was sixteen, and he changed my life. He was an adorable, melon-headed, blue-eyed monster. He made me laugh and smile at a time when I found those expressions nearly impossible, but he also meant that while my classmates were kissing each other and going to dances and crashing their parents' cars, I was at home feeding him and playing with him and getting up in the middle of the night to change his diapers because my disabled mother couldn't even pick him up. I was trapped in a terrifying maze of emotions, caught between my brother and my family, my brother and my friends, and my friends and myself. This would continue for the next two years until I was kicked out for refusing to be my brother's mother, but the summer after he was born I had endured all that I could. I broke down violently, and in an effort to get as far away from my life as quickly as possible I signed up for a wilderness trip in Canada that seemed insane – ten days of canoeing through extensive lake and river networks and camping in nearly virgin forests with absolutely zero modern conveniences. We paddled for four or five hours a day, carried our stuff and our canoes through dozens of poorly defined trails, and ate freeze-dried food we had to keep hidden from bears. Our watches were even confiscated. I came home happily sore, sunburned, and alive. Watching the sun dip behind peaceful lakes and miles of teeming forest, trying to count each prick of light in the explosion of stars above my sleeping bag, drinking clean water straight from the lakes, forcefully extending the limits of my physical and emotional strength, and completing what was an equally thrilling and infuriating journey resuscitated my passion for the world beyond my barren Indiana backyard.
Other trips followed rapidly, thanks to the generosity of my family and friends: two weeks in Spain, a week in Puerto Rico, a semester in the UK (including excursions to Wales, Scotland, and Amsterdam), and the beginning of a summer in Mexico. As I traveled, I learned I was not wrong when I felt the world was full of suffering. This life can be cruel and we often damage each other past the point of repair. But I also learned that the world is brimming with stunning, raw beauty and expansive, exhilarating, permeating love, that our small planet is home to abundant opportunities to explore, discover and learn about other cultures, and that we have myriad chances to meet other people and thereby come to know the strange and fantastic world around us.
So now as I look around and see my university peers carefully taking notes on lined paper, precisely laying down their plans for life, and diligently looking forward, I acknowledge that I have a choice. I choose to go a different route. When we are all thrown into the pool of the “real world” to sink or swim, I know I will do just fine. I choose to open my eyes wide, look around me, and go in whatever direction seems like the best way to learn something new or meet someone amazing. I choose to make my life an exploration and an adventure. I choose to throw away limitations, to go, and to see what's really out there.
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