Friday, July 29, 2011

Authenticity

Amelia came into the bed at 3 AM and I could not for the life of me get back to sleep, so I figured I would get up and do something productive. This isn't like me, to have thoughts swimming in my head that keep me awake at night. Most of the time I am so busy doing, that any thought process I have is directly related to the very thing before me that I must try and tackle.

But I understand why I am feeling this way, as I have had this type of occurrence before, and I have a pretty strong sense of what it means. Though it is fairly difficult to capture it quickly in words, I am going to try and do so, as writing has always been the way in which I am able to process complexity and be able to happily get on with my day without that weighted feeling.

In 2006, my husband and I got married in the town where I grew up for most of my childhood-- Ocean City, NJ. And for the week before the wedding, we decided to be somewhat traditional and stay in separate houses, both of us living with our parents for the week before the big day.

Each morning, suffering from bridal nerves, and from jet lag, I woke up very early and would head out to the boardwalk for a long run. The first couple of days, the runs were amazing - I felt this jolt of excitement being in such a magical place, that represented the best parts of my childhood (the beach, the ocean, the boardwalk).

One morning, about the third day in, I headed out for the run, and about half way into it, coming up to Park Place, the street where my grandparent's house use to be and the street on which my husband's family were staying, I experienced this intense wave of emotion, something so unexpected, a sense of grief for the loss of a life that was gone, a memory of pain that I felt many years ago when the innocence of this place and this life slipped through the cracks.

I kept running through the tears, true to self, pushing through hard emotions through positive action. And I went through the day as any almost-bride would do, but there was something different under the layers, something surreal, this sense of self that once was many years ago as a child, and this sense of self now, as a person about to get married and start her own family, coming together in such an authentic way, that it felt almost like a collision.

Yesterday, something very similar happened. I went to the UC Berkeley campus for the first time in many years on my own. I have been to the campus with friends and family many times since graduation, but this was the first time I went on my own. And like the wedding many years ago, the journey started off very exciting, driving up University Ave, passing one of my favorite coffee shops, trying to take a picture from the car with my phone.

I smiled as I drove up the streets, knowing their ins and outs, all the short-cuts, as if I had never left. Walking up Telegraph Ave, towards Sproul Hall, seeing all the new students coming in with their parents, orientation, early arrivals, and I found myself wanting to reach out to them, to talk to them, share with them so many great memories about such an amazing part of my life.

And I went to the student cafe, bought a coffee, and sat down at a table in a back corner, remembering that the person that was me many years of go would have always sat at the front table, hoping to see someone I knew pass by and we could start up a conversation about our most-recent endeavors, be they intellectual, social, or just the normal stuff that happens to us as kids starting to become adults.

Almost like a scene in a JK Rowling book, this process of remembering while experiencing the physical sensations of that memory, allowed me to tap into that emotion that I felt so strongly, many years ago, to re-experience what was a lifetime back then in a brief 1-hour coffee break. It shook me, honestly, so I got up and decided to go and purchase a sweatshirt, which I have been meaning to do for awhile now.

In the shop, a young girl asked me to help her pick out a sweatshirt-- I was thinking that it could be her first one,  her first year, that nervousness, she reaching out to me, knowing I had come through it. And I recommended that the smaller size fit her better - in the long run, it would be the one she would treasure for the years to come - not the over-sized version that hid her young curves.

Walking to the car, in this contemplative state, driving back to the city in traffic, the tears finally came down my cheeks, that collision again of self, in the truest, most authentic sense. Each day I wake up and do what is in front of me, and as the years go by, the memories shift, even disappear, and there is an invisible veil between all the layers of activity going on around me in my current life, and the foundation that sits beneath it all.

That time of becoming an adult, of moving from the space of innocence into that space of reality, is still very much a part of the way in which I act each and every day, the way I treat my friends, my family, my daughter, the way I work, the way I think, the way I engage with the world. All those failed attempts at being a better self, until I eventually started to get the hang of it, started to find my voice, as a writer, started to realize the importance of balancing two sides of self - that relentless me that needs to get it done, with that gentler, kinder me, who is empathetic to the difficulties that all of us face sometimes when we are trying to do more than we did the day before, even if that is just putting one foot in front of the other in very tiny baby steps.

As I lay there in bed, with Amelia beside me, I wondered if there are people in this world who never experience this sense of colliding selves, as each and every memory is cherished, positive, shining, in an array of a happy life. I try and imagine my daughter Amelia as an adult looking across her life with nothing but fond memories, no struggles, no complex, grey moments in which she wasn't really sure how to match what she was feeling on the inside with what the norms were telling her to feel on the outside.

And here I am now, having spent a good bit of time writing, in a private space, closely examining the authentic self, and I feel a sense of contentment, that somehow all the bends and curves in life are much more interesting, beautiful like a spider web than any kind of Truman Show image that might replace it. I want this for my daughter, maybe a softer version than my own. But I want her to know what it means to be authentic, to experience life in all shades of color, including grey.

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