It's somewhat fitting that when I get to the part in the story that left me speechless for the first time, I have no more words to say.
I can't tell you about Paris -- I already have too many times and stuffing it into words makes it into language, and I want to keep it in the same plasma state it was. I'd like to tell you -- about each moment and each now, and how the colors inside them blinded me, how everything burned and how I turned around one day and realized I wasn't lost anymore. But I can't. To do so would be a great disservice.
All I can tell you is that -- and what a silly, piddling statement it is -- I changed.
Maybe that's the theme I'm going for in this series, the only thing I can say for sure at the end of this mad, violent, busy, wonderful, intensely full period of life they call college. It's nothing but another door, but this door means something because I've changed -- but not just changed ---
I think the word I want is become. I have become.
This past year, the final one, has been no exception. I spent the first semester staring at myself in a mirror and having no clue who was looking back, struggling to fit the life I had before with the life I had created. I knew I'd be culture shocked and thought I had prepared, but prepared to fight a monster whose face I didn't even recognize when I saw it.
Sure, there were the academics -- a thesis, for one -- but this year was about making a dream come true, and celebrating the journey. I think I did both spectacularly.
I have nothing more to say about it, which is not to say there is nothing to say about it -- about each year and each summer and each splendid moment that was terribly unperfect and perfect, and about this year, but again -- I can't. I've run out. Paris left me speechless and I haven't recovered my tongue yet.
I'm just the girl who has become, and turns to face the world with immense passion and determination. Who is either really stupid or a visionary, and I guess we'll find out soon enough.
It's been a fun ride. I wouldn't have wanted it any shorter or longer, any more or less, anything else than exactly what it was.
(Everything is always perfect, remember?)
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Retrospective, part 2
Sometimes I feel like I got it all together, and I can do anything.
Sometimes, I feel like a kid and the sheer audacity of what I propose to do knocks me over.
I have probably said it before, but let me put it straight: I propose to move to Paris and start a dance company that will be world-famous, all while breaking all the rules of contemporary dance. Before I hit thirty.
The girl I was just out of high school wanted to save the world. Something involving a world-wide revolution for life or something like that. I commend her vision and her passion. But something happened after my sophomore year of college -- saving the world just wasn't that important anymore.
Changing the world around me, the people I meet, the circle I move in, for the better -- that remained. But I realized, in one of those terrible moments when you think to yourself, man, this must be what it means to be an adult, that I just simply can't save the world. I know, it sounds obvious now. But it came as a surprise to that Gillian. All you can do is live where you are. The world is too Big.
Sometimes I find it hard to remember what I was doing the first two years of college. That was when I was still convinced that I was going to double major, when dance was something I loved but not yet something I couldn't live without, still playing catch-up with my technique. When I was still considering musical theatre and did those shows on campus. More than anything, I was busy. Tons of classes, work, shows, rehearsals, what have you.
In fact, looking back, I'm quite impressed with freshman and sophomore Gillian's sheer willpower to get through the semesters she did. I went to Oxford for Christmas, spent a week in Orlando for an acting/dancing/etc competition thing that turned out to be a total waste of time and money, spent a summer teaching dance and circus, and quite stupidly went over the credit limit in fall sophomore year.
The sophomore slump hit me hard, dragging me through an extraordinarily difficult five week stretch that I only later realized must have been some kind of depressive episode, which I finally pulled myself out of by my bootstraps. Coming into the spring, I was hit with a burst of madness and had a (to me) very real dilemma:
Should I stay at Columbia, work my butt off, and graduate a year early so I could get my life started, or take a year to dick around in Paris and then go back and graduate?
To everyone except me, the answer was obvious, but for a few weeks, I agonized over it. I was working a fantastic internship at an off-Broadway theatre company, I was balancing a 20 credit load with the internship and some 12 hours of work while I was at it, and had just decided, for the first time, to ditch the second major and focus on my passion -- wherever it took me. Bursting with the energy from that decision, just getting my life started sounded like a great idea.
Then it happened. I was at an info session for the Paris program, and I saw myself on a bike, pedaling through the streets of Paris. On a cloudy day, over a bridge. Whatever was happening that day, it was significant.
I can't explain it. All I know is that, in that moment, I knew I had to be in Paris, because something important was going to happen that day and I needed to be there to know what it was.
Following that moment, not going to Paris was no longer an option, and I barrelled forward as though nothing, including a complete lack of funding, could stop me.
The rest, they say, is history.
Sometimes, I feel like a kid and the sheer audacity of what I propose to do knocks me over.
I have probably said it before, but let me put it straight: I propose to move to Paris and start a dance company that will be world-famous, all while breaking all the rules of contemporary dance. Before I hit thirty.
The girl I was just out of high school wanted to save the world. Something involving a world-wide revolution for life or something like that. I commend her vision and her passion. But something happened after my sophomore year of college -- saving the world just wasn't that important anymore.
Changing the world around me, the people I meet, the circle I move in, for the better -- that remained. But I realized, in one of those terrible moments when you think to yourself, man, this must be what it means to be an adult, that I just simply can't save the world. I know, it sounds obvious now. But it came as a surprise to that Gillian. All you can do is live where you are. The world is too Big.
Sometimes I find it hard to remember what I was doing the first two years of college. That was when I was still convinced that I was going to double major, when dance was something I loved but not yet something I couldn't live without, still playing catch-up with my technique. When I was still considering musical theatre and did those shows on campus. More than anything, I was busy. Tons of classes, work, shows, rehearsals, what have you.
In fact, looking back, I'm quite impressed with freshman and sophomore Gillian's sheer willpower to get through the semesters she did. I went to Oxford for Christmas, spent a week in Orlando for an acting/dancing/etc competition thing that turned out to be a total waste of time and money, spent a summer teaching dance and circus, and quite stupidly went over the credit limit in fall sophomore year.
The sophomore slump hit me hard, dragging me through an extraordinarily difficult five week stretch that I only later realized must have been some kind of depressive episode, which I finally pulled myself out of by my bootstraps. Coming into the spring, I was hit with a burst of madness and had a (to me) very real dilemma:
Should I stay at Columbia, work my butt off, and graduate a year early so I could get my life started, or take a year to dick around in Paris and then go back and graduate?
To everyone except me, the answer was obvious, but for a few weeks, I agonized over it. I was working a fantastic internship at an off-Broadway theatre company, I was balancing a 20 credit load with the internship and some 12 hours of work while I was at it, and had just decided, for the first time, to ditch the second major and focus on my passion -- wherever it took me. Bursting with the energy from that decision, just getting my life started sounded like a great idea.
Then it happened. I was at an info session for the Paris program, and I saw myself on a bike, pedaling through the streets of Paris. On a cloudy day, over a bridge. Whatever was happening that day, it was significant.
I can't explain it. All I know is that, in that moment, I knew I had to be in Paris, because something important was going to happen that day and I needed to be there to know what it was.
Following that moment, not going to Paris was no longer an option, and I barrelled forward as though nothing, including a complete lack of funding, could stop me.
The rest, they say, is history.
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