As I've mentioned several times previously on this blog and haven't stopped talking about for months now (leaving my friends and acquaintances no doubt really really ready for me to actually leave), on July 6th, at 1:45AM, I will be on an airplane at JFK, heading for Phnom Penh, Cambodia. With a stop in Taipei for 3 hours and to convince myself to get back on an airplane after 16 full hours to get there.
Sass aside. I have a one way ticket. I have no idea when I am coming back, or where. I've started telling people I'll be there until I leave, which no matter what will be true. It should be somewhere in the six to nine month range, I think, and sometime next March I will probably be found in Denver. Maybe.
As for what I'm doing...well, that's a bit up in the air too, but at least until the end of the summer I'll be teaching choreography workshops with Cambodian Living Arts, an organization with a mission to rebuild the country by bringing back the arts. I'll probably continue working with them during the fall, including an all-expenses paid trip to Siem Reap to teach at the School of Fine Arts there.
In the meantime, I'll be teaching English to pay the bills (I hope), collaborating with whatever arts organizations I can possibly collaborate with, and (hopefully) producing work.
It sounds fantastic, and I'm so thrilled, but I always get asked, why in the world - literally - Cambodia?
Well. My friend Nettra, my suitemate freshman year, is from there, and infused me with her passion for the country. Somehow, we decided I should go, but there was never time, until there was, and I threw the idea out into the world to see what happened.
Simply enough, I thought it was time to give back. I'm fascinated by how the arts are returning, having been entirely stamped out during the Khmer Rouge, and I have the opportunity to really be a part of the movement to rebuild.
And besides -- I love how I can get real experience teaching and working, and in the process immerse myself in a part of the world that is entirely foreign to anything I have previously experienced. I love how I can go and be whoever the hell I want, as accomplished as I care to be.
I'll probably have a camera, and at the very least, I'll be keeping up the blog, writing down the adventure as it unfolds under my feet. I have absolutely no idea where it's going to lead me, but I think I want to be there to find out.
See you on the other side! (literally)
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Monday, June 25, 2012
Rolling Home
Well I don't know, I ain't been told
Everybody wants a hand to hold.
They're so afraid of being old,
so scared of dying, so unknown
and so alone, rollin' home.
You'll hear me talk a lot on this blog about being alive, and storming after dreams. I would say they're obsessions, and I do my best to always be doing both.
Recently I was talking with a friend, and he asked, "why wouldn't people just do what they want all the time?" Why indeed, settle for a job you hate or at best dislike, and put away what you truly want as being unattainable, silly, and generally impossible?
I can't answer that. If I could, I'd be very rich. But I think it has something to do with the above lyrics, from a folk song. Some deep fear -- maybe of being the only on the road you're on, the outcast, the wandering beggar. Or maybe not. Maybe it just takes too much energy. Sit down, you're rocking the boat, indeed.
I don't know the way out. I think I have some inkling, what works for me at least. A few years ago, I thought I wanted to save the world. That was a pretty ridiculous thing to think, but it was hard to let go of. So scared of dying, so unknown and so alone, right? But I realized somewhere along the way, I don't need to save the world to make a difference. I don't even need to try.
There's nothing big I want to prove, no mountains that I need to move
or even claim what's right or true for you.
My sights, my songs are slightly charred, but things are only what they are, and nothing new --
But for me, I think they'll do.
Now I just have my dreams. They are what they are, and for me, they work, and I storm after them with an obsession that is if not blind, at least consuming. I don't have to move mountains, just climb them step by step.
As for me, I think that'll do.
Everybody wants a hand to hold.
They're so afraid of being old,
so scared of dying, so unknown
and so alone, rollin' home.
You'll hear me talk a lot on this blog about being alive, and storming after dreams. I would say they're obsessions, and I do my best to always be doing both.
Recently I was talking with a friend, and he asked, "why wouldn't people just do what they want all the time?" Why indeed, settle for a job you hate or at best dislike, and put away what you truly want as being unattainable, silly, and generally impossible?
I can't answer that. If I could, I'd be very rich. But I think it has something to do with the above lyrics, from a folk song. Some deep fear -- maybe of being the only on the road you're on, the outcast, the wandering beggar. Or maybe not. Maybe it just takes too much energy. Sit down, you're rocking the boat, indeed.
I don't know the way out. I think I have some inkling, what works for me at least. A few years ago, I thought I wanted to save the world. That was a pretty ridiculous thing to think, but it was hard to let go of. So scared of dying, so unknown and so alone, right? But I realized somewhere along the way, I don't need to save the world to make a difference. I don't even need to try.
There's nothing big I want to prove, no mountains that I need to move
or even claim what's right or true for you.
My sights, my songs are slightly charred, but things are only what they are, and nothing new --
But for me, I think they'll do.
Now I just have my dreams. They are what they are, and for me, they work, and I storm after them with an obsession that is if not blind, at least consuming. I don't have to move mountains, just climb them step by step.
As for me, I think that'll do.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
A late Father's Day shoutout
Father's Day was yesterday, but I thought it might be time to give a mention to my dad, who has been mentioned here briefly but never with any detail.
Dad used to be a lawyer. He wanted to go into music and writing out of college, but that wasn't going to pay the bills, so he went to law school instead. Some thirty years later, he got a shock from the maker on a ski slope, when he fell from a poma lift and shattered his pelvis.
That was in 2006. Since, his life -- and ours -- have never been the same. He decided he was done stifling a boundlessly creative soul, and hasn't stopped creating since. At the beginning, it was a multimedia show that he and I were partners in crime on, but it spiraled from there to screenplays, more shows, books, seminars.
None of his productions have come to fruition yet, but to say it was just the products that matter would be a great oversight. Not content to purely change careers in his mid-fifties, Dad embarked on a life-changing quest to find a whole new way of living -- a full-accountability, fully alive, fully aware kind of life. It was a journey so transforming that the whole family was touched by it, and are all on our own journeys in the same vein. Of self-discovery, forgiveness, lack of judgment.
Throughout the process -- well, you couldn't expect it to be easy, and it wasn't. There were many times when the normal person might have quit and gone back to the hated status quo, begged the universe's pardon for disturbing it, and forgotten how to dream.
Not Dad. He kept going, kept creating, no matter what happened. He is without a doubt the most courageous man I have ever met, and I'm constantly inspired by him -- and challenged to be a better person. I think, even if he wasn't my dad, we'd be friends.
I encourage you to check out his website, which just launched a couple weeks back: www.kevin-rhodes.com.
Happy Father's Day, Dad! Love you dearly.
Dad used to be a lawyer. He wanted to go into music and writing out of college, but that wasn't going to pay the bills, so he went to law school instead. Some thirty years later, he got a shock from the maker on a ski slope, when he fell from a poma lift and shattered his pelvis.
That was in 2006. Since, his life -- and ours -- have never been the same. He decided he was done stifling a boundlessly creative soul, and hasn't stopped creating since. At the beginning, it was a multimedia show that he and I were partners in crime on, but it spiraled from there to screenplays, more shows, books, seminars.
None of his productions have come to fruition yet, but to say it was just the products that matter would be a great oversight. Not content to purely change careers in his mid-fifties, Dad embarked on a life-changing quest to find a whole new way of living -- a full-accountability, fully alive, fully aware kind of life. It was a journey so transforming that the whole family was touched by it, and are all on our own journeys in the same vein. Of self-discovery, forgiveness, lack of judgment.
Throughout the process -- well, you couldn't expect it to be easy, and it wasn't. There were many times when the normal person might have quit and gone back to the hated status quo, begged the universe's pardon for disturbing it, and forgotten how to dream.
Not Dad. He kept going, kept creating, no matter what happened. He is without a doubt the most courageous man I have ever met, and I'm constantly inspired by him -- and challenged to be a better person. I think, even if he wasn't my dad, we'd be friends.
I encourage you to check out his website, which just launched a couple weeks back: www.kevin-rhodes.com.
Happy Father's Day, Dad! Love you dearly.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
And then life happened
And muttering constantly about how long May was taking to finish, I turned around to open the door and found weeks trailing behind me like little ducklings, wondering how long it would take until I noticed them.
It all just happened, just like every other moment of our lives, important and unimportant and essential and thrown away -- it doesn't change, each now unravels precisely as did its predecessor. If there's an apocalypse, it will be just like every other moment and we'll probably never know it happened, until much later.
I don't remember what it was like to be in school, to have homework, to go to class. That's probably a strange thing to say, but this is coming from someone who has trouble remembering what happened last weekend. I think it's a caveat - if that word is even appropriate here - of living in the now. But needless to say, I don't miss it.
Perhaps one reason life is happening behind my back, only to stop guilty when I turn but betrayed by its movement, is that I've been feeling particularly transitory -- unsettled in the most literal sense, un-settled, not settled. And no wonder -- I'm staying in someone else's apartment. I get my clothes from a suitcase. I'm leaving in four weeks (!!!!) from Thursday, to somewhere across the globe that promises to be exactly like nothing I have ever experienced, ever.
It's been many years of violent transition in the family -- the easiest way to describe it is Dad changing careers, but that doesn't cover how the whole family melted like steel in the forge and came out changed. How the life we had before is nothing like the life we live now, down to the way we think, act, make decisions. Inside it's easy to think this is all there ever will be, this uncertain wobbling as we try to figure out where and what to do, how to live when we can barely see tomorrow, let alone our hands in front of our faces.
Lately, I've had a couple thoughts. One, a simple bit of optimism: it won't always be like this. I can imagine a time in the not so distant future when I will have a little place, however small, that is mine, that I can buy little decorations for and come home to each night. Sure, I probably won't know when or where or how to make my dreams of dancing and choreographing come true, but I will have that one little bit of stability. Maybe even many years from now, my company will be well-established. Stability, like life, goes in cycles. At least, I'm willing to bet on it.
The second is something zen masters would probably approve of: until such time that I am settled, I must become settled in transition. Transition needs to be my home for now. Travel lightly. Dance from place to place like a sparrow, ready to fly at every moment.
In the meantime, I'm preparing for the move as best as I can, holding rehearsals, working. Thinking I'm paying attention to time and turning around to find it sneaking by while I wasn't looking.
It all just happened, just like every other moment of our lives, important and unimportant and essential and thrown away -- it doesn't change, each now unravels precisely as did its predecessor. If there's an apocalypse, it will be just like every other moment and we'll probably never know it happened, until much later.
I don't remember what it was like to be in school, to have homework, to go to class. That's probably a strange thing to say, but this is coming from someone who has trouble remembering what happened last weekend. I think it's a caveat - if that word is even appropriate here - of living in the now. But needless to say, I don't miss it.
Perhaps one reason life is happening behind my back, only to stop guilty when I turn but betrayed by its movement, is that I've been feeling particularly transitory -- unsettled in the most literal sense, un-settled, not settled. And no wonder -- I'm staying in someone else's apartment. I get my clothes from a suitcase. I'm leaving in four weeks (!!!!) from Thursday, to somewhere across the globe that promises to be exactly like nothing I have ever experienced, ever.
It's been many years of violent transition in the family -- the easiest way to describe it is Dad changing careers, but that doesn't cover how the whole family melted like steel in the forge and came out changed. How the life we had before is nothing like the life we live now, down to the way we think, act, make decisions. Inside it's easy to think this is all there ever will be, this uncertain wobbling as we try to figure out where and what to do, how to live when we can barely see tomorrow, let alone our hands in front of our faces.
Lately, I've had a couple thoughts. One, a simple bit of optimism: it won't always be like this. I can imagine a time in the not so distant future when I will have a little place, however small, that is mine, that I can buy little decorations for and come home to each night. Sure, I probably won't know when or where or how to make my dreams of dancing and choreographing come true, but I will have that one little bit of stability. Maybe even many years from now, my company will be well-established. Stability, like life, goes in cycles. At least, I'm willing to bet on it.
The second is something zen masters would probably approve of: until such time that I am settled, I must become settled in transition. Transition needs to be my home for now. Travel lightly. Dance from place to place like a sparrow, ready to fly at every moment.
In the meantime, I'm preparing for the move as best as I can, holding rehearsals, working. Thinking I'm paying attention to time and turning around to find it sneaking by while I wasn't looking.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
At a loss for words (part 3)
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?)
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?)
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.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Graduation and Imposing Language: A retrospective (part 1)
It's getting to the place where graduation is close enough that it's got me looking forward, but especially looking back, thinking back to the four years I've spent associated with Columbia University in the City of New York, the institution of which I will soon become an alumn. Which seems, at this present moment, somewhat surreal.
I'm not a fan of words, in general, and especially not in situations like this, because I always feel like they add colors and interpretations -- or more accurately, take away colors -- so multi-faceted, impossibly colored experiences just look like one thing. Words add judgments, and what simply was becomes good or bad in their light.
But at the same time, I do want to put words to it. Maybe, as I think I wrote somewhere once, if only just to figure out what I myself think about it.
I think, since there is a lot to be said, I'm going to do this in several parts, at least that would be the plan, so I've somewhat optimistically put "part 1" into the title, though the chances of parts two, three, etc being forthcoming are a bit iffy.
The first thing I think about is the difference between this graduation and my high school graduation. High school. A gymnasium, a class of 72. As valedictorian, I gave a speech that absolutely no one cared about and that I can't even remember myself, then quietly got my diploma and went on my way. I never belonged there and no one made any move to pretend otherwise, least of all myself.
But this time, I'll be one of thousands, probably not distinguishable in any way, in light blue like everyone else. And thrilled to be there, proud of what I've done.
Though there has been a lot of water under the bridge -- so much I think the bridge itself has probably been destroyed and remade a few times -- I think that the only thing that hasn't changed is that my focus is still forward. But when I left high school, I just wanted to get away. Now, I'm just excited for the next step. One is past-centric, the other future. It makes a big difference.
I arrived at Columbia with that fresh out of high school 'gotta save the world' attitude, the kind of young, invincible thing drilled into you, because you're the next generation and dammit, you gotta do something worthwhile. I had a strong extraordinary complex, the kind of outsider mentality that carried over from high school -- okay-to-be-a-loner-cuz-you'll-save-the-world. Like I said, extraordinary complex. I had all sorts of visions (delusions?) of grandeur and hell, I was barely 18 years old. I've always been a bit ahead of myself and as such, I don't let myself be young, but I was. Naive and inexperienced and well, you can't really expect much else, could you?
I've read her journals; I know what she thought. I think I understand why she thought them, though not always. I assume I'd recognize her if we met. But I'm not sure she'd recognize me, and when I read her words, I don't relate to them. We are separated by only four years, but much more time, and more than a few lifetimes.
Perhaps in a further post, I'll take a more detailed look at the years.
But right now, I can just think of this:
She was such a cold little girl. For one thing, she thought she could never fall in love. Since then, I've been in love twice, each equally magnificent and heartbreaking and dramatic, and neither of which I care to go into detail except to say that -- as cliché as it may be -- I was fundamentally and permanently changed by the experience.
She thought she was such an outsider. Since then, I've learned how to be beloved, and how to belong somewhere, how to let myself be at home.
She thought she was so old. Now, I think I'm so young.
However ---
I can look back and point out everything she wasn't, and everything she thought because she was young, and she didn't know better, and all her arrogance and melodrama, but that would be forgetting one very crucial thing --
She had the courage to jump and become who I am today -- certainly not a finished product or perfect or whatever it may be -- but someone I'm proud of. There's a song in Cirque du Soleil's Quidam that says "Someone I am is waiting for my courage/the one I want, the one I will become will catch me."
So whatever else she might have done, she had the courage to jump, and trust that I would catch her.
For that, I have to thank her.
I'm not a fan of words, in general, and especially not in situations like this, because I always feel like they add colors and interpretations -- or more accurately, take away colors -- so multi-faceted, impossibly colored experiences just look like one thing. Words add judgments, and what simply was becomes good or bad in their light.
But at the same time, I do want to put words to it. Maybe, as I think I wrote somewhere once, if only just to figure out what I myself think about it.
I think, since there is a lot to be said, I'm going to do this in several parts, at least that would be the plan, so I've somewhat optimistically put "part 1" into the title, though the chances of parts two, three, etc being forthcoming are a bit iffy.
The first thing I think about is the difference between this graduation and my high school graduation. High school. A gymnasium, a class of 72. As valedictorian, I gave a speech that absolutely no one cared about and that I can't even remember myself, then quietly got my diploma and went on my way. I never belonged there and no one made any move to pretend otherwise, least of all myself.
But this time, I'll be one of thousands, probably not distinguishable in any way, in light blue like everyone else. And thrilled to be there, proud of what I've done.
Though there has been a lot of water under the bridge -- so much I think the bridge itself has probably been destroyed and remade a few times -- I think that the only thing that hasn't changed is that my focus is still forward. But when I left high school, I just wanted to get away. Now, I'm just excited for the next step. One is past-centric, the other future. It makes a big difference.
I arrived at Columbia with that fresh out of high school 'gotta save the world' attitude, the kind of young, invincible thing drilled into you, because you're the next generation and dammit, you gotta do something worthwhile. I had a strong extraordinary complex, the kind of outsider mentality that carried over from high school -- okay-to-be-a-loner-cuz-you'll-save-the-world. Like I said, extraordinary complex. I had all sorts of visions (delusions?) of grandeur and hell, I was barely 18 years old. I've always been a bit ahead of myself and as such, I don't let myself be young, but I was. Naive and inexperienced and well, you can't really expect much else, could you?
I've read her journals; I know what she thought. I think I understand why she thought them, though not always. I assume I'd recognize her if we met. But I'm not sure she'd recognize me, and when I read her words, I don't relate to them. We are separated by only four years, but much more time, and more than a few lifetimes.
Perhaps in a further post, I'll take a more detailed look at the years.
But right now, I can just think of this:
She was such a cold little girl. For one thing, she thought she could never fall in love. Since then, I've been in love twice, each equally magnificent and heartbreaking and dramatic, and neither of which I care to go into detail except to say that -- as cliché as it may be -- I was fundamentally and permanently changed by the experience.
She thought she was such an outsider. Since then, I've learned how to be beloved, and how to belong somewhere, how to let myself be at home.
She thought she was so old. Now, I think I'm so young.
However ---
I can look back and point out everything she wasn't, and everything she thought because she was young, and she didn't know better, and all her arrogance and melodrama, but that would be forgetting one very crucial thing --
She had the courage to jump and become who I am today -- certainly not a finished product or perfect or whatever it may be -- but someone I'm proud of. There's a song in Cirque du Soleil's Quidam that says "Someone I am is waiting for my courage/the one I want, the one I will become will catch me."
So whatever else she might have done, she had the courage to jump, and trust that I would catch her.
For that, I have to thank her.
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