Chapter 7: What If
When I left home as a teenager to go to college, I expected a transformation would take place. It was the transformation most of us imagine, those of us who struggled to find our place in the social topography where we grew up. At college, far away and with a fresh start, through some undefined alchemical process, I wouldn’t just bloom. I would become.
But who? What? Some set of loosely defined concepts and ideas, I suppose, a fantasy version of myself who had been waiting to emerge, freed from small-town tyranny, my penchant for trouble in every form, and an unfortunate ability to give up the things I loved the moment they became work. At college I would be focused and disciplined. I would fit in. I would become an activist of some sort or another. Above all, I would be very, very cool.
When you are seventeen, you are perhaps not yet entirely whoever it is that you are supposed to be, but you do have a fundamental you-ness. Will you grow? One very much hopes so. Can you change? Yes, of course, and you will.
But change is a tricky word, and one to treat lightly.
When I arrived at college, I began to discover a sad fact about humans, which is that at no point in our lives do we emerge from a chrysalis. There is no overnight transformation. I did not magically become a new person, and certainly not a cool one.
But this knowledge did not stop me from being ever hopeful, or perhaps from ignoring the unfortunate truth of the matter and pressing onward. Raves, punk shows, vintage shops, rockabilly. I tried on selves and discarded them one after another. San Francisco was next. Swing dancing, indie rock. A job in editorial. Then New York, which surely was the city that would make happy, turn me into myself and not inside out. To Washington, DC then, back to school, to bands, to a collage of topics and studies. A return to the west coast, to California, to southern and northern, to new peers and friends, to slip in and out of newer and newer versions of me.
Through each new city and wardrobe change, I was still not the person I wanted to be. Never the girl I saw across the room and admired. Never at home in my own body.
What if I had not insisted on going to Berkeley, I would ask myself. What if I had kept baking and cooking once I left home, like I had as a child. What if I had not quit acting. What if I had written more, had kept diaries. What if I hadn’t been too scared to go on my junior year abroad. What if I had listened to my father when I was nineteen, had kept learning to program computers after I started. What if I had stayed in San Francisco or in New York. What if I had never moved to either place. What if I had been taller. What if I had been prettier. What if I had been thinner. What if I had been more happy-go-lucky. What if I had been smarter. What if I had been dumber. What if I had made more effort to be a better friend, to be a better person, to be anything other than who I was. What if I had been another person entirely.
It is easier than it should be to shove all these questions into a bag and drag it to your next destination, the job where you’ll get it right in the city where you’ll finally get it right.
What if you could run away from yourself.
There is only one way to get it right, which is to one day walk to the edge of a cliff and toss each one of those questions off the side. Barring access to a cliff, dig down into the bottom of the bag until you find the one at the very bottom, the queen at the heart of this merciless question colony: What if you loved yourself.
Welcome home.
