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Living out my Core Desire to be Freeby sammweber |
During
my senior year of college, one of my English professors asked my class
to think about what moments or experiences have made us feel the freest.
While we took a few minutes to gather our thoughts, Professor Craig
shared that her most freeing moment occurred while she stood in the
Paris airport by herself. She said there was something so liberating
about being in a foreign country surrounded by people who spoke another
language, had no idea who she was, or what she had done with her life up
to that point. There were no expectations and no worries. It was just a
few solitary moments where she could just be. Professor Craig’s words deeply resonated with me.
For
as long as I can remember, my core desire in life has always been to be
free. Though my parents were never the authoritarian kind - demanding
straight A’s on my report card, watching the clock to make sure I was
home by curfew, yelling at me to eat my broccoli – I was always
naturally motivated to achieve a certain level of success in life. This
translated into the feeling like my life was pretty much planned out for
me. I was to perform well in school, graduate from college, start a
career, find a husband, and save enough money to retire one day. It
wasn’t so much that my parents insisted on this cookie-cutter life for
me, but I did feel the pressure from everyone else around me to fit a
certain mold.
However,
I longed to be like one of those independent women I had read about in
my English classes. I wanted to be Elizabeth Gilbert and eat, pray, and
love my way through Europe. I wanted to be Kelly Corrigan and quit my
job just to end up looking after two kids in Australia so that I could
understand and appreciate my mom more. I wanted to be Alice Steinbach so
that I could spend a month finding myself in the streets of Paris. I
wanted to exchange this cookie-cutter life for a life of travel and
writing and meaning. To put it simply, I wanted to be me, or at least to give myself a chance to figure out who that was before it was too late.
In
August, I decided to break the mold and do something reckless. I spent
twenty-nine days backpacking across Europe. In that time, I learned a
lot about myself. I discovered that I hate rules, but I always follow
them. I like to sit in silence and appreciate the present moment. And,
that as soul-satisfying as traveling can be, there is no substitute for
the comfort of your own bed after a month of sleeping in hostels. As to
be expected, my trip turned out to be nothing like I expected.
Nevertheless, my month abroad gave me a chance to take a few moments to
finally breathe so that I could gain a better perspective on life.
That
month abroad also gave me the confidence to follow through on another
major life decision: four weeks ago, I moved 3,000 miles across the
country to San Francisco. And it is here that I have found my freedom.
While I left behind many people and places that I love in Pennsylvania,
like Professor Craig, I have found it to be incredibly liberating to
live in a new city where no one knows my past or particularly cares
about my future. I am just free to be me.
